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The video says "No coding skills? No worries. Just write your code with ChatGPT."

Retr0id 3y ago
I'm incredibly curious what the experience of trying to write code with ChatGPT is like, if you have no prior knowledge. Obviously, it's impossible for me (and most others reading this) to un-know everything and approach it with fresh eyes. Are there any good real-time videos of non-programmers using ChatGPT to write code? (seems like the best way to understand what it's like)
- joshuakogut 3y ago
  Well, it is helpful for learning new frameworks and stuff when you already have a grasp of general programming.
  - Retr0id 3y ago
    Right, but what's it like if you know nothing about programming?
    - willcipriano 3y ago
      Sort of like using Google translate for a language you don't speak a word of I'd imagine. "I just said what the computer said to say and now the computer/waiter is mad at me"
- NhanH 3y ago
  Hard to image OpenAI not at least trying that out, so if we haven't heard any thing from them, it's safe to say it doesn't work.
- iamflimflam1 3y ago
  I suspect that people would fail at the first hurdle and not even be able to run the code. I also wonder if they'd even know what to ask.
  - specproc 3y ago
    I've got a colleague who's been doing it with some success. Nothing fancy, just a bit of doodling around in Python for fun. He's been leaning heavily on the repl.it Copilot thingy, so it's more autocomplete than code blocks. He uses ChatGPT for working out error messages.
  - Retr0id 3y ago
    Reminds me of a (perhaps fake) screenshot of a conversation I saw that went: Person A: I just used AI to make my own website, you're gonna be out of a job soon. Person B: Oh? Let me see it. Person A: Here it is C:\Users\Bob\Desktop\index.html
- djbusby 3y ago
  I'm helping another fella who's new to coding, he's using GPT to make some code. Most of what it produces won't even compile. Building for sensors on an ESP32 platform. BUT! GPT will get a good way there, a main with some sub-routines, stuff like that. I don't think it's good enough to teach. If you can already code, then GPT can ramp you up on a new project faster, or accelerate and existing project
- anonzzzies 3y ago
  It’s pretty good depending on what you are doing. With Python and JS/TS, the last checkpoint for training datasets really matters. These api’s for no reason at all to me, rot incredibly fast, so the code it generates was valid in September 2020, but now it is almost completely incompatible. I was raised with (80s/90s); never break the public api unless you have to and make a migration path if you do; now it is ‘let’s definitely break the public api, with any minor version change and just waste everyone’s life fixing it, we don’t care’. And gpt doesn’t know this. It usually does make up code that’s close to correct and relatively easy to fix though, but you need to know how to read the docs and not panic that actually everything is spitting errors. If you ask it for C, Java or vanilla js it fares better but there you suffer from the memory window; now with 16k tokens, we are seeing massive improvements. The api deprecation (read; we just throw away or change without warning) issue remains and is a huge issue; I cannot even see how they would properly fix that in LLMs. They are going to have outdated versions in their search space; how do they know to ignore them? And next to that there are the hallucinations.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  I am wondering why people seem to think it's so great for this. It's fine for I guess boiler plate code construction but totally falls over when I give it e.g. complicated Rust borrow checker problems. And if you tell it a mistake it's made, it just buries itself deeper branching off into spirals of more and more incorrent solutions. To me, it's like a junior developer I have to coach constantly.
- asimovfan 3y ago
  You can ask ChatGPT to explain pieces of code.
- Ireallyapart 3y ago
  [dead]
- idiotsecant 3y ago
  I am an engineer, but not a software engineer. I write python sometimes to help me do engineer-y things in my domain but I am absolutely not very fluent, just enough to get by. chatGPT often transforms a frustrating multi-hour stack overflow session into a 5 minute query. The result is definitely not something you'd want to maintain and probably has built in inefficiencies and edge cases I don't know about but it did it's job, which was to do the thing I wanted it to do so I can go on with my work.
  - circuit10 3y ago
    Honestly for tasks it’s able to do easily ChatGPT code is probably more maintainable because it’s more well-commented, formatted etc. than code a human would write if they’re just trying to quickly hack something together Sometimes I think “you can tell this part of my code was generated by ChatGPT because it’s actually good, unlike the rest of it” Of course it’s likely to make subtle mistakes that are hard to debug if you ask it to do anything complicated because it can’t test its own code (well, I’ve heard something about a code interpreter in the Plus version but I don’t know how well that works)
  - advantager 3y ago
    Similar situation here. I usually can hack something together in python, but end up spending a couple hours reading stack overflow posts, and often meeting with co-workers to debug my code. Chat-GPT can often write simple code for me and honestly saves some time.
- markstos 3y ago
  I don't know Rust well and was having trouble the finding the docs I needed, so I asked AI for help. Google Bard, I think. It had real difficulty producing code that ran and worked. The problem was that there were breaking API changes across versions of the library, but it was just using probabilities of method names being correct, and it didn't ask me or tell me which version of the library it was targeting, so it was just a mismash of incompatible code. But the code LOOKED good and the AI was confident it was a good answer. Overall, it felt like wasted time sifting through confidently-wrong answers.
  - cooljacob204 3y ago
    Google Bard isn't the best when it comes to writing code in my experience. Try GPT, you should get very different results.
- Beached 3y ago
  it's hell, I have been trying it for a couple.months, and you can't really get anything of note built. it's buggy AF, and gets stuck in loops and can't debug itself. it works ok as a starting point of " I have no freaking clue how to approach this" to "ahh I can see how that will work" and then you go write your own code with the lead.
ape4 3y ago
Hey ChatGPT, hire me a programmer

I'm incredibly curious what the experience of trying to write code with ChatGPT is like, if you have no prior knowledge. Obviously, it's impossible for me (and most others reading this) to un-know everything and approach it with fresh eyes. Are there any good real-time videos of non-programmers using ChatGPT to write code? (seems like the best way to understand what it's like)

joshuakogut 3y ago
Well, it is helpful for learning new frameworks and stuff when you already have a grasp of general programming.
- Retr0id 3y ago
  Right, but what's it like if you know nothing about programming?
  - willcipriano 3y ago
    Sort of like using Google translate for a language you don't speak a word of I'd imagine. "I just said what the computer said to say and now the computer/waiter is mad at me"
NhanH 3y ago
Hard to image OpenAI not at least trying that out, so if we haven't heard any thing from them, it's safe to say it doesn't work.
iamflimflam1 3y ago
I suspect that people would fail at the first hurdle and not even be able to run the code. I also wonder if they'd even know what to ask.
- specproc 3y ago
  I've got a colleague who's been doing it with some success. Nothing fancy, just a bit of doodling around in Python for fun. He's been leaning heavily on the repl.it Copilot thingy, so it's more autocomplete than code blocks. He uses ChatGPT for working out error messages.
- Retr0id 3y ago
  Reminds me of a (perhaps fake) screenshot of a conversation I saw that went: Person A: I just used AI to make my own website, you're gonna be out of a job soon. Person B: Oh? Let me see it. Person A: Here it is C:\Users\Bob\Desktop\index.html
djbusby 3y ago
I'm helping another fella who's new to coding, he's using GPT to make some code. Most of what it produces won't even compile. Building for sensors on an ESP32 platform. BUT! GPT will get a good way there, a main with some sub-routines, stuff like that. I don't think it's good enough to teach. If you can already code, then GPT can ramp you up on a new project faster, or accelerate and existing project
anonzzzies 3y ago
It’s pretty good depending on what you are doing. With Python and JS/TS, the last checkpoint for training datasets really matters. These api’s for no reason at all to me, rot incredibly fast, so the code it generates was valid in September 2020, but now it is almost completely incompatible. I was raised with (80s/90s); never break the public api unless you have to and make a migration path if you do; now it is ‘let’s definitely break the public api, with any minor version change and just waste everyone’s life fixing it, we don’t care’. And gpt doesn’t know this. It usually does make up code that’s close to correct and relatively easy to fix though, but you need to know how to read the docs and not panic that actually everything is spitting errors. If you ask it for C, Java or vanilla js it fares better but there you suffer from the memory window; now with 16k tokens, we are seeing massive improvements. The api deprecation (read; we just throw away or change without warning) issue remains and is a huge issue; I cannot even see how they would properly fix that in LLMs. They are going to have outdated versions in their search space; how do they know to ignore them? And next to that there are the hallucinations.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
I am wondering why people seem to think it's so great for this. It's fine for I guess boiler plate code construction but totally falls over when I give it e.g. complicated Rust borrow checker problems. And if you tell it a mistake it's made, it just buries itself deeper branching off into spirals of more and more incorrent solutions. To me, it's like a junior developer I have to coach constantly.
asimovfan 3y ago
You can ask ChatGPT to explain pieces of code.
Ireallyapart 3y ago
[dead]
idiotsecant 3y ago
I am an engineer, but not a software engineer. I write python sometimes to help me do engineer-y things in my domain but I am absolutely not very fluent, just enough to get by. chatGPT often transforms a frustrating multi-hour stack overflow session into a 5 minute query. The result is definitely not something you'd want to maintain and probably has built in inefficiencies and edge cases I don't know about but it did it's job, which was to do the thing I wanted it to do so I can go on with my work.
- circuit10 3y ago
  Honestly for tasks it’s able to do easily ChatGPT code is probably more maintainable because it’s more well-commented, formatted etc. than code a human would write if they’re just trying to quickly hack something together Sometimes I think “you can tell this part of my code was generated by ChatGPT because it’s actually good, unlike the rest of it” Of course it’s likely to make subtle mistakes that are hard to debug if you ask it to do anything complicated because it can’t test its own code (well, I’ve heard something about a code interpreter in the Plus version but I don’t know how well that works)
- advantager 3y ago
  Similar situation here. I usually can hack something together in python, but end up spending a couple hours reading stack overflow posts, and often meeting with co-workers to debug my code. Chat-GPT can often write simple code for me and honestly saves some time.
markstos 3y ago
I don't know Rust well and was having trouble the finding the docs I needed, so I asked AI for help. Google Bard, I think. It had real difficulty producing code that ran and worked. The problem was that there were breaking API changes across versions of the library, but it was just using probabilities of method names being correct, and it didn't ask me or tell me which version of the library it was targeting, so it was just a mismash of incompatible code. But the code LOOKED good and the AI was confident it was a good answer. Overall, it felt like wasted time sifting through confidently-wrong answers.
- cooljacob204 3y ago
  Google Bard isn't the best when it comes to writing code in my experience. Try GPT, you should get very different results.
Beached 3y ago
it's hell, I have been trying it for a couple.months, and you can't really get anything of note built. it's buggy AF, and gets stuck in loops and can't debug itself. it works ok as a starting point of " I have no freaking clue how to approach this" to "ahh I can see how that will work" and then you go write your own code with the lead.

ape4 3y ago

Hey ChatGPT, hire me a programmer