4 ms·

If "chaining some simple API calls" is "a large part of your work", I can see it being incredibly useful. I already used it in this way a few times and it saved

If "chaining some simple API calls" is "a large part of your work", I can see it being incredibly useful. I already used it in this way a few times and it saved me some time indeed. However, as a software developer I feel like it's actually a tiny minority of my work; most of it is "doing some thinking" and slowly unfolding the inner parts of systems in order to understand how they work and how to fix them or make them do what I want, for which GPT is at best useful as a rubber duck to speak to.

Frost1x 4y ago
Actually this is the aspect I love about GPT. The less I have to spend dealing with idiosyncrasies of arbitrary API boiler plate and can get down to the business of leveraging said things together or designing aspects of said things to achieve a new goal, the better. As someone who is far from an expert in DevOps, this has saved me a lot of time recently, and it worked fairly well to get past duct taping infrastructure together to then leverage.
- seba_dos1 4y ago
  > The less I have to spend dealing with idiosyncrasies of arbitrary API boiler plate In my experience, GPT saves me some time when I don't really have to think about idiosyncrasies anyway. In cases where I do have to think about them, GPT doesn't offload that from me. It often tries to mash unrelated frameworks together or makes up non-existing APIs that it would find useful for the given task. When it does work well, it mostly boils down to automated series of copy'n'pastes. Saves a bit of time, sure, but doesn't really transform the way I work.
- sangnoir 4y ago
  Who knew the next "billion dollar security mistake" after C's memory handling would be LLM-suggested misconfigurations? I bet someone will try to sell an LLM-based service to fix thr bugs caused by other code-generating LLMs.
simonw 4y ago
It's a pretty amazing rubber duck. I used it to brainstorm approaches to tracking changes to a database table using SQLite and ended up building an entirely new library: - Article: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/15/sqlite-history/ https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/15/sqlite-history/ - ChatGPT transcript: https://gist.github.com/simonw/1aa4050f3f7d92b048ae414a40cddbd5 https://gist.github.com/simonw/1aa4050f3f7d92b048ae414a40cdd...

Frost1x 4y ago

Actually this is the aspect I love about GPT. The less I have to spend dealing with idiosyncrasies of arbitrary API boiler plate and can get down to the business of leveraging said things together or designing aspects of said things to achieve a new goal, the better. As someone who is far from an expert in DevOps, this has saved me a lot of time recently, and it worked fairly well to get past duct taping infrastructure together to then leverage.

seba_dos1 4y ago
> The less I have to spend dealing with idiosyncrasies of arbitrary API boiler plate In my experience, GPT saves me some time when I don't really have to think about idiosyncrasies anyway. In cases where I do have to think about them, GPT doesn't offload that from me. It often tries to mash unrelated frameworks together or makes up non-existing APIs that it would find useful for the given task. When it does work well, it mostly boils down to automated series of copy'n'pastes. Saves a bit of time, sure, but doesn't really transform the way I work.
sangnoir 4y ago
Who knew the next "billion dollar security mistake" after C's memory handling would be LLM-suggested misconfigurations? I bet someone will try to sell an LLM-based service to fix thr bugs caused by other code-generating LLMs.

simonw 4y ago

It's a pretty amazing rubber duck. I used it to brainstorm approaches to tracking changes to a database table using SQLite and ended up building an entirely new library: - Article: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/15/sqlite-history/ https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/15/sqlite-history/ - ChatGPT transcript: https://gist.github.com/simonw/1aa4050f3f7d92b048ae414a40cddbd5 https://gist.github.com/simonw/1aa4050f3f7d92b048ae414a40cdd...