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I've been using ChatGPT to help me learn Golang. It has been an amazing learning tool. Almost like having a bespoke personal StackOverflow answering my exact q

I've been using ChatGPT to help me learn Golang. It has been an amazing learning tool. Almost like having a bespoke personal StackOverflow answering my exact questions. Is it right 100% of the time, no. Could it build my project autonomously, most definitely not. Has it accelerated my learning of Golang, yes. AI is a tool (at least for now). And like many tools, when used proficiently, it can boost your productivity and therefore make you better, not redundant at your job.

barbariangrunge 3y ago
First, it came for the teachers (online course creators)...
inadequatespace 3y ago
I’ve been doing similar for various frameworks (Flink) > is it right 100% of the time, no. No human teacher is going to be right 100% of the time either. I suppose ChatGPT is a little more overconfident / doesn’t have a sense of tone or anything to assess confidence; even still, though, given how overconfidence is incentivized in the workplace, it’s not that different in this regard from an average coworker.
- SkipperCat 3y ago
  > it’s not that different in this regard from an average coworker. 100% agree. Its like having a coworker who you can constantly pester with technical questions. I really love how you can ask ChatGPT follow ups to earlier questions and it understand the context. At some point, I expect companies to put their internal Wikis/documentation into LLMs so you can learn and onboard staff faster. You'd probably need a large amount of data to learn on, but I guess some of the large companies have that.
dangerwill 3y ago
People that say this are outing themselves as un-engaged learners that are likely not going to get much in the way of lasting gains in skills due to AI coaching. All it is doing is regurgitating StackOverflow at you but reworded to fit into the box that your questions create. Since you are the learner here, it is likely that your questions aren't better structured than the original explanation content that ChatGPT was trained on, and since it will just hallucinate things at random and without you knowing, I would bet money that your understanding of the topic will be subtly wrong in places. Basically, anyone who thinks that having a tutor-like experience with a robot is worth trading away correctness and consistency, is revealing that they care more about getting an answer in a form they can easily ingest than actually having any depth of understanding of the topic at hand. And before someone makes the silly argument that "well your human tutor could be wrong too!", all of the training data that trained chatGPT was written by humans, and so the potential human error is still the same. ChatGPT is adding a new source of error that is unpredictable and based on dozens of anecdotes I have seen here and on Twitter, none of the enthusiasts are double checking it's output for bullshit
- pixl97 3y ago
  You're making some mistakes here... I don't have a human tutor available and to get one would represent a significant cost for me. Slightly wrong and available is worth far more than always right and unavailable, especially at the early starting point where you're unsure of how much you want to invest into an endeavor.
  - dangerwill 3y ago
    No I'm not, this is a false dichotomy. The resources that chatGPT was trained on are available in their raw form and it is easy to google for official golang resources/search stackoverflow for golang problems. Before chatGPT you would go out and find these resources, read them in the form designed by the original author, and think through the gaps between your intuition and what the author has written. You can still do this today without a financial cost, because the choice was never an either/or between paying for a human tutor and learning. And just because there are now nearly free and shitty tutors available, it doesn't mean learning should be done via these means / is effectively done via these means.
    - pixl97 3y ago
      I'm guessing you don't get paid, therefore your time doesn't have a financial cost? A recent example of this was some crap CSM my wife was working on that had piss poor documentation from the vendor. As in the vendor documentation was just flat wrong and would never work the way they wanted it implemented. We dumped a code snippet off in GPT4 and it came back with "This is wrong, do this instead" which worked. The key point here is it solved a problem in a system that is rarely worked on. Going outside the vendor documentation to learn the python/js interaction the vendor obviously did not understand would have represented a huge investment over the payout of correcting the output of a single page.
      - dangerwill 3y ago
        Lmao OK so looking something up without ChatGPT means I'm unemployed. Sure bud.

barbariangrunge 3y ago

First, it came for the teachers (online course creators)...

inadequatespace 3y ago

I’ve been doing similar for various frameworks (Flink) > is it right 100% of the time, no. No human teacher is going to be right 100% of the time either. I suppose ChatGPT is a little more overconfident / doesn’t have a sense of tone or anything to assess confidence; even still, though, given how overconfidence is incentivized in the workplace, it’s not that different in this regard from an average coworker.

SkipperCat 3y ago
> it’s not that different in this regard from an average coworker. 100% agree. Its like having a coworker who you can constantly pester with technical questions. I really love how you can ask ChatGPT follow ups to earlier questions and it understand the context. At some point, I expect companies to put their internal Wikis/documentation into LLMs so you can learn and onboard staff faster. You'd probably need a large amount of data to learn on, but I guess some of the large companies have that.

dangerwill 3y ago

People that say this are outing themselves as un-engaged learners that are likely not going to get much in the way of lasting gains in skills due to AI coaching. All it is doing is regurgitating StackOverflow at you but reworded to fit into the box that your questions create. Since you are the learner here, it is likely that your questions aren't better structured than the original explanation content that ChatGPT was trained on, and since it will just hallucinate things at random and without you knowing, I would bet money that your understanding of the topic will be subtly wrong in places. Basically, anyone who thinks that having a tutor-like experience with a robot is worth trading away correctness and consistency, is revealing that they care more about getting an answer in a form they can easily ingest than actually having any depth of understanding of the topic at hand. And before someone makes the silly argument that "well your human tutor could be wrong too!", all of the training data that trained chatGPT was written by humans, and so the potential human error is still the same. ChatGPT is adding a new source of error that is unpredictable and based on dozens of anecdotes I have seen here and on Twitter, none of the enthusiasts are double checking it's output for bullshit

pixl97 3y ago
You're making some mistakes here... I don't have a human tutor available and to get one would represent a significant cost for me. Slightly wrong and available is worth far more than always right and unavailable, especially at the early starting point where you're unsure of how much you want to invest into an endeavor.
- dangerwill 3y ago
  No I'm not, this is a false dichotomy. The resources that chatGPT was trained on are available in their raw form and it is easy to google for official golang resources/search stackoverflow for golang problems. Before chatGPT you would go out and find these resources, read them in the form designed by the original author, and think through the gaps between your intuition and what the author has written. You can still do this today without a financial cost, because the choice was never an either/or between paying for a human tutor and learning. And just because there are now nearly free and shitty tutors available, it doesn't mean learning should be done via these means / is effectively done via these means.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    I'm guessing you don't get paid, therefore your time doesn't have a financial cost? A recent example of this was some crap CSM my wife was working on that had piss poor documentation from the vendor. As in the vendor documentation was just flat wrong and would never work the way they wanted it implemented. We dumped a code snippet off in GPT4 and it came back with "This is wrong, do this instead" which worked. The key point here is it solved a problem in a system that is rarely worked on. Going outside the vendor documentation to learn the python/js interaction the vendor obviously did not understand would have represented a huge investment over the payout of correcting the output of a single page.
    - dangerwill 3y ago
      Lmao OK so looking something up without ChatGPT means I'm unemployed. Sure bud.