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How much coding do you think is "solving novel problems"? I'm a senior developer and integrated ChatGPT and Github Copilot into my workflow. No more StackOverf
by koonsolo 3y ago
How much coding do you think is "solving novel problems"?
I'm a senior developer and integrated ChatGPT and Github Copilot into my workflow. No more StackOverflow for me, ChatGPT handles that part. And Copilot auto writes a lot of my code, amazingly well for a lesser known language Haxe.
My son recently came to me with a school assignment for his Arduino. As an extra he wanted to play a song through a buzzer, instead of just a beep like the assignment said. Just asked chatGPT to write this for the song Ghost Busters. I know C and C++ but never programmed an Arduino. You know how long it took ChatGPT to write it? About half a minute. You know how much time it would cost me or you?
1. Quickly figure out how Arduino works with the loop, outputs, etc. Does it have a C precompiler? etc.
2. Find the notes of Ghost Busters.
3. Figure out what kind of output is sent to the buzzer. (Solution: it's the frequency)
4. Translate notes to frequencies
5. Put the notes of Ghost Busters into an array, or something like that. How to handle timings and pauses?
6. Write the code to play it.
Well, I can tell you it saved me tons of time. It was faster than typing this comment.
Just dismissing it with "I've seen chat GPT write terrible code" is not so smart in my opinion. But hey, the more programmers think they are too good for ChatGPT and Copilot, the better for developers like me who are already great, and just add some more productivity on top of that.
Edit: Just wanted to add something on top of it, for the projects I'm working on myself: Copilot just terribly good at writing unit tests. And if you think about it, it makes perfect sense. It has all the context it needs for that. It's surprisingly also very good at writing Selenium integration tests, although I expected it not to have enough context for that, since it doesn't really see the application. I guess a lot of functionality is very logical or trivial for it to take best guesses.