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I have the extremely fortunate scenario of watching my wife just begin a computer science degree now, with no prior experience programming whatsoever. This is n

I have the extremely fortunate scenario of watching my wife just begin a computer science degree now, with no prior experience programming whatsoever. This is not hyperbole: ChatGPT is an absolute game-changer when it comes to getting through the basics. It is simply far, far easier for a newbie to see a computer generate 1 / 3 / 5 slightly-different attempts to solve a specific problem they have, and then to pattern match sufficiently to be able to solve the problem themselves, than it is to muddle around by yourself with it for hours and hours with no end in sight. I thought she would have to ask me, someone who has been slinging Python in some form since 2008, a question at least once a week. In reality it's been about 3 times over the last 9 months. ChatGPT doesn't do much for experienced SWEs, but it demolishes the difficulty curve for newbies. I wish I had this when I was learning.

gnicholas 3y ago
> ChatGPT doesn't do much for experienced SWEs, but it demolishes the difficulty curve for newbies. Interesting, my impression was that ChatGPT helps experienced SWEs by filling out large amounts of boilerplate-ish code. It sounds like that's not your experience, though?
- RussianCow 3y ago
  Which might make you, what, maybe 10% more productive overall? The more experienced you are, the less time you spend writing boilerplate code, so it's not that huge of a win in the grand scheme of things compared to what it provides when you're learning something new.
  - koonsolo 3y ago
    Not writing any unit tests are you?!?!? ;)
  - anonzzzies 3y ago
    It makes us far more productive; all of us, so we just do more as a team rather than fire someone. For me, copilot writing out if / then / else stuff like it's reading my mind, so tab -> 15 lines, all correct. Or mappings (.map .filter etc) which it completely does within milliseconds. As an experienced programmer, I cannot avoid these things and they do save me a lot of time and debugging. Oh yes, and tests. Going from a jira task to a bunch of jest tests for code that doesn't exist yet is a pretty big win. Very much more than 10% of the average day. You have to be sharp, be a good code reader and writer and it cannot do anything 'alone', but it makes us vastly more efficient.
  - raincole 3y ago
    > Which might make you, what, maybe 10% more productive overall? The more experienced you are... But the more exeperienced you are, more valuable your output is (in most cases). So the 10% of your productivity could be more valuable than a novice's 50%.
    - tuyiown 3y ago
      The more experience you are, the less the value is in the output objective productivity. The ability to write self descriptive, maintainable and bitrot resistant code in one pass goes way above feature delivery.
- pinkcan 3y ago
  that would be copilot not chatgpt
- repox 3y ago
  I think it works well in both ways. I've been developing software professionally for the past ~20 years and there's no doubt that the combination of ChatGPT and CoPilot greatly reduces the amount of time I would usually spend on boilerplate code. Now I can more or less just review the suggestions, review tests and progress with my solutions a lot faster. At the same time, I see my 9 year old girl using ChatGPT to create Minecraft extensions; she has no prerequisites for actually developing software, but she manages to make some small extensions and have them work either way. Acknowledging that she doesn't actually learn much from this, I think one can assume that everything in between (e.g. using ChatGPT for pair learning) is definitely also possible. But whatever AI is outputting, there's no way these qualified guesses can beat experience from a professional developer. I know that the output will never be better than the prompt, but sometimes the output - no matter how much effort you put into the prompt - is visibly just a qualified guess.
- hickelpickle 3y ago
  While I am not the most experienced, I did recently finish a CS a degree and find chatgpt a great resource for getting a general understanding to go off of when approaching something outside my domain of experience. Having a core understanding of things in general makes it easier to identify when it's wrong about things, and the majority of time I am not using it to generate code, outside of asking for an example. Being able to ask a few direct question on a topic "demolishes" the time spent to become familiar with something, as most of the time I am just looking for answer about some specifics or to clear up some ambiguity in my understanding of a new concept. I would say with someone new to coding it can be bad and good, as a lot of times it glosses over things, or can be slightly incorrect as it makes assumptions (or more so just answers in a more general context, and when asked to elaborate, or challenged on specifics it will reformat/improve it's answer, but without knowing you need to do so, I could see it easily see it providing half-baked foundational knowledge. You can ask it "x" and it will give a answer, but then if you ask it I am trying to do "y" with "x" and isn't "z" an issue or area of concern with its answer it will reformulate the information provided as its original response was flawed, but if you don't know exactly what the "y" you want to do is, or the "z" being foundational knowledge to challenge it on, you can easily get a whole wall of text that is out of context with what you are actually trying to learn.
  - worrycue 3y ago
    > find chatgpt a great resource for getting a general understanding to go off of when approaching something outside my domain of experience. This is my hang up with LLMs … I don’t trust them. Frankly it seems just as easy if not easier to just google keywords and read sites. Google vs LLM is like asking random people on the internet (some are brilliant, some don’t know anything, some are nuts, … etc.) vs asking random people on the internet but all of them have a history of suffering from hallucinations and are routine liars with a compulsive need to answer confidently even when they know nothing.
    - abenga 3y ago
      Especially with an Idea of how they work, I find it very hard to trust them too. Doesn't help that the couple of times I asked them about something subtle, GPT gave me code with the same bugs I was trying to fix. I can see how a beginner would find it useful though.
- 411111111111111 3y ago
  I tried that a few times, but by the time I've explained enough for the code to be close to what I want i could've just implemented it myself twice over... And that's ignoring the fact that it's always generating subtly wrong or just poorly performing code. It might change eventually as ide integrations improve, but for now it's a novelty for me.
- mgaunard 3y ago
  If you have boilerplate anywhere in your code, then you have a design problem.
  - tangjurine 3y ago
    Yeah, my design problem is the language I'm using, the language version I'm using, the outdated framework I'm using, and the 3! frontend frameworks I'm using on my job.
    - mgaunard 3y ago
      Stop using them? A good craftsman crafts his own tools.
      - Toutouxc 3y ago
        Both this post and the one two levels back honestly sound like someone who's never worked in a SW company. Craft my own tools? When? Who's paying for that? Too much boilerplate? Tell that to the 20+ people who built this thing and are long gone. You really have to work for a specific kind of company to be able to change any of that.
        mgaunard 3y ago
        I have about 15 years experience professionally as a software engineer, in all kinds of companies, at all kinds of different seniority levels. I call bullshit. Your task is to deliver a project that does what it's supposed to, all in a timely fashion. You do whatever it takes, including getting rid of old code and rewriting stuff if it makes you more productive overall. Writing code that does what you want is much faster than taking someone else's code and twist it to do something it was not written to do. You should always be very careful about what dependencies you use, as most often you will have to deal with their limitations and bugs, and they could kill your project. If you had 20 separate people who contributed to the same thing and left then you most likely have huge code debt. Managing that sort of thing is a daily task for any software engineer. Apparently your strategy is to just add debt onto the pile and put your head in the sand pretending it's not your problem. Instead you should plan tactical refactoring moves to make the codebase leaner and better able to adapt to the business needs, all without breaking any existing functionality and workflows. You're asking "when". That's the wrong question. It's up to you to manage your time and invest it into tasks that help you save time later on. A software engineer is usually not paid by the hour either, so you just do the work until you're satisfied with the effort you've put in.
- layoric 3y ago
  In my experience, the key is that it can also provide good explanations for the basics as well. You can fairly easily overwhelm it, but with some practise of prompting, learning new language/domain basics it is pretty good, and much better than googling to learn the same. The best of all is that you can query your understanding and get decent feedback.
- shortcake27 3y ago
  As an SWE, my problem isn’t boilerplate. It’s architecture and orchestration. I cancelled my Copilot subscription because it just doesn’t help with this. Let alone ChatGPT which has zero context about the application. I would like an AI to tell me if I’m reinventing the wheel or if something similar can be abstracted. Whether what I’m doing aligns with existing patterns in the codebase. How the application as a whole could be refactored to improve maintainability, performance, or both. This can all already be done by a human with experience and context, so it must be possible with AI. This will be the biggest game changer for me.
  - slashdev 3y ago
    I can’t believe you canceled copilot, at $10 a month it pays for itself every single day for me. I’m just baffled how it can be so useful for me and not useful for you.
    - __loam 3y ago
      Once you get over the novelty it gets pretty annoying.
      - slashdev 3y ago
        I’ve been using it for a full year now, that’s just not been my experience.
    - TillE 3y ago
      I've found it extremely similar to IntelliCode for C#, which is not very impressive. Surprisingly I've found it does a better job of writing accurate comments than generating useful code. Maybe it's good for some languages, or for code that's doing the exact stuff a hundred people have already written. Copilot X certainly looks cool, but who knows when that'll be ready.
      - slashdev 3y ago
        I use it the other way around. I write the comments first and then I find it can often fill in the code. I find it especially helpful with SQL queries, and with boilerplate type code. It’s also very helpful when I’d need to lookup the usage of various methods. I just start with the comments and most of the time it saves me the context switch to the browser to lookup the usage.
an_aparallel 3y ago
Also as a learner - what i've found incredible is the ability to get AN ANSWER...without context switching. 1 window, 1 result location, no fishing...its trivial to test that given solution...as a beginner...my problems are fairly one dimensional. Not to mention...things like "cool want to learn python"..."wait - wtf..how do i setup a venv in python!!"
CTDOCodebases 3y ago
The good thing about ChatGPT is that you can keep asking it to explain something in a different way until it explains it in a way that “clicks” with you. Of course you then have to compare this explanation against all others and see if it fits or if it’s not a valid explanation. It’s also great for exploring topics which have polluted namespaces on search engines. Overall though I think the majour benefit of ChatGPT is it just teaches people to clearly define problems as natural language questions. Developing this ability helps the subconscious mind solve problems when the user is away from screens.
- teleforce 3y ago
  +1 for this, I think this is one of the most useful and underrated things enabled by ChatGPT for effective learning. One of the types of teaching video that I've found very helpful is where an expert, usually a professor explaining a concept (e.g zero knowledge proof) to five different audiences starting from school kids up to fellow researchers or professors. You can basically ask many different targeted levels of questions to ChatGPT for example, explain the concept as I am five years old, etc.
- quijoteuniv 3y ago
  Yes, but my impression is that chatGPT returns are really linked to the intelligence of the user. How good are to get things out of it. For a clever person starting to code you can easily jumps all the technical hops of the base knowdledge needed to start creating. In every discipline you need base knowdledge that allow you to be able to make the connections.
- slashdev 3y ago
  When you want to compare software or library X versus Y ChatGPT is excellent. Google is a morass of spam on those queries.
- Guthur 3y ago
  > Overall though I think the majour benefit of ChatGPT is it just teaches people to clearly define problems as natural language questions. Developing this ability helps the subconscious mind solve problems when the user is away from screens. Yeah we've had them for a while, it was called the rubber duck, ;)
SanderNL 3y ago
> It is simply far, far easier for a newbie to see a computer generate 1 / 3 / 5 slightly-different attempts to solve a specific problem they have, and then to pattern match sufficiently to be able to solve the problem themselves, than it is to muddle around by yourself with it for hours and hours with no end in sight. That's because it is easier. Multiple choice is easier than open questions. It's also a good way to not really grasp anything deeply.
- dgb23 3y ago
  But you don’t need to grasp anything deeply. You want to create something small and get a little bit of feedback quickly. When we teach math to children we don’t start with algebraic structures and proofs. We give them simple recipes. Later we show them problems that the recipes can’t solve and dig deeper. „By the way, the thing we did last year, it actually works like this…“
  - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
    > When we teach math to children we don’t start with algebraic structures and proofs. We give them simple recipes. This is not mathematics, but arithmetic/calculating. When one starts teaching not-children-anymore mathematics (typically at the university), one indeed starts with something of the kind of algebraic structures and proofs.
    - dgb23 3y ago
      The GP mentioned that their wife is entirely new to programming but starting a CS degree. She will certainly learn the deeper concepts in university, but catching up with coding quickly, even in a shallow manner, is super beneficial. I think it's a huge plus.
      - zero_shift 3y ago
        I don't mean to neg anyone, but will someone pick up the fundamentals, if they can keep leaning on a chatbot?
cambaceres 3y ago
> ChatGPT doesn't do much for experienced SWEs, but it demolishes the difficulty curve for newbies. I wish I had this when I was learning. Yes and no. It doesn't help me that much with technologies that I'm senior within, but it has allowed me to work with a wider tech-stack. For example, I can now confidently write any SQL querys I want (so far anyway) although my prior knowledge in SQL isn't that deep.
insanitybit 3y ago
Experienced SWE here. ChatGPT is awesome for me. It's great for learning new technologies and it's great for writing programs that I'm too lazy to write myself.
- seanthemon 3y ago
  Hey, also an SSE here, do you find that writing code is becoming a grind now that GPT can generally handle most changes within a single context? I'm having a harder and harder time justifying writing a lot of code myself when faster tools are right at my fingertips Would love to hear how other SWE's who are using GPT feel about this
  - insanitybit 3y ago
    I mostly use ChatGPT to write code while I'm playing video games. Cutscene/ load screen comes up and I review what it sent and have it iterate. Then back to games. It's much slower at producing good code than I am but it's much faster for me to write a prompt than a program, so ultimately it allows me to do two things at once because 'prompt time' is so short I can fit it in between other things. I don't think of programming as a grind unless I'm working in a shitty codebase, which does happen, certainly.
slashdev 3y ago
Graying SWE here. ChatGPT is quite helpful, and so is Copilot. I mostly use ChatGPT for well defined functions that I need to implement that don’t rely on too much external context. I love it for writing unittests. It frequently makes mistakes, but it’s easier than starting from zero.
sitkack 3y ago
If you are an experienced SWE and you aren’t getting something out of it, you are holding it wrong.

gnicholas 3y ago

> ChatGPT doesn't do much for experienced SWEs, but it demolishes the difficulty curve for newbies. Interesting, my impression was that ChatGPT helps experienced SWEs by filling out large amounts of boilerplate-ish code. It sounds like that's not your experience, though?

RussianCow 3y ago
Which might make you, what, maybe 10% more productive overall? The more experienced you are, the less time you spend writing boilerplate code, so it's not that huge of a win in the grand scheme of things compared to what it provides when you're learning something new.
- koonsolo 3y ago
  Not writing any unit tests are you?!?!? ;)
- anonzzzies 3y ago
  It makes us far more productive; all of us, so we just do more as a team rather than fire someone. For me, copilot writing out if / then / else stuff like it's reading my mind, so tab -> 15 lines, all correct. Or mappings (.map .filter etc) which it completely does within milliseconds. As an experienced programmer, I cannot avoid these things and they do save me a lot of time and debugging. Oh yes, and tests. Going from a jira task to a bunch of jest tests for code that doesn't exist yet is a pretty big win. Very much more than 10% of the average day. You have to be sharp, be a good code reader and writer and it cannot do anything 'alone', but it makes us vastly more efficient.
- raincole 3y ago
  > Which might make you, what, maybe 10% more productive overall? The more experienced you are... But the more exeperienced you are, more valuable your output is (in most cases). So the 10% of your productivity could be more valuable than a novice's 50%.
  - tuyiown 3y ago
    The more experience you are, the less the value is in the output objective productivity. The ability to write self descriptive, maintainable and bitrot resistant code in one pass goes way above feature delivery.
pinkcan 3y ago
that would be copilot not chatgpt
repox 3y ago
I think it works well in both ways. I've been developing software professionally for the past ~20 years and there's no doubt that the combination of ChatGPT and CoPilot greatly reduces the amount of time I would usually spend on boilerplate code. Now I can more or less just review the suggestions, review tests and progress with my solutions a lot faster. At the same time, I see my 9 year old girl using ChatGPT to create Minecraft extensions; she has no prerequisites for actually developing software, but she manages to make some small extensions and have them work either way. Acknowledging that she doesn't actually learn much from this, I think one can assume that everything in between (e.g. using ChatGPT for pair learning) is definitely also possible. But whatever AI is outputting, there's no way these qualified guesses can beat experience from a professional developer. I know that the output will never be better than the prompt, but sometimes the output - no matter how much effort you put into the prompt - is visibly just a qualified guess.
hickelpickle 3y ago
While I am not the most experienced, I did recently finish a CS a degree and find chatgpt a great resource for getting a general understanding to go off of when approaching something outside my domain of experience. Having a core understanding of things in general makes it easier to identify when it's wrong about things, and the majority of time I am not using it to generate code, outside of asking for an example. Being able to ask a few direct question on a topic "demolishes" the time spent to become familiar with something, as most of the time I am just looking for answer about some specifics or to clear up some ambiguity in my understanding of a new concept. I would say with someone new to coding it can be bad and good, as a lot of times it glosses over things, or can be slightly incorrect as it makes assumptions (or more so just answers in a more general context, and when asked to elaborate, or challenged on specifics it will reformat/improve it's answer, but without knowing you need to do so, I could see it easily see it providing half-baked foundational knowledge. You can ask it "x" and it will give a answer, but then if you ask it I am trying to do "y" with "x" and isn't "z" an issue or area of concern with its answer it will reformulate the information provided as its original response was flawed, but if you don't know exactly what the "y" you want to do is, or the "z" being foundational knowledge to challenge it on, you can easily get a whole wall of text that is out of context with what you are actually trying to learn.
- worrycue 3y ago
  > find chatgpt a great resource for getting a general understanding to go off of when approaching something outside my domain of experience. This is my hang up with LLMs … I don’t trust them. Frankly it seems just as easy if not easier to just google keywords and read sites. Google vs LLM is like asking random people on the internet (some are brilliant, some don’t know anything, some are nuts, … etc.) vs asking random people on the internet but all of them have a history of suffering from hallucinations and are routine liars with a compulsive need to answer confidently even when they know nothing.
  - abenga 3y ago
    Especially with an Idea of how they work, I find it very hard to trust them too. Doesn't help that the couple of times I asked them about something subtle, GPT gave me code with the same bugs I was trying to fix. I can see how a beginner would find it useful though.
411111111111111 3y ago
I tried that a few times, but by the time I've explained enough for the code to be close to what I want i could've just implemented it myself twice over... And that's ignoring the fact that it's always generating subtly wrong or just poorly performing code. It might change eventually as ide integrations improve, but for now it's a novelty for me.
mgaunard 3y ago
If you have boilerplate anywhere in your code, then you have a design problem.
- tangjurine 3y ago
  Yeah, my design problem is the language I'm using, the language version I'm using, the outdated framework I'm using, and the 3! frontend frameworks I'm using on my job.
  - mgaunard 3y ago
    Stop using them? A good craftsman crafts his own tools.
    - Toutouxc 3y ago
      Both this post and the one two levels back honestly sound like someone who's never worked in a SW company. Craft my own tools? When? Who's paying for that? Too much boilerplate? Tell that to the 20+ people who built this thing and are long gone. You really have to work for a specific kind of company to be able to change any of that.
      - mgaunard 3y ago
        I have about 15 years experience professionally as a software engineer, in all kinds of companies, at all kinds of different seniority levels. I call bullshit. Your task is to deliver a project that does what it's supposed to, all in a timely fashion. You do whatever it takes, including getting rid of old code and rewriting stuff if it makes you more productive overall. Writing code that does what you want is much faster than taking someone else's code and twist it to do something it was not written to do. You should always be very careful about what dependencies you use, as most often you will have to deal with their limitations and bugs, and they could kill your project. If you had 20 separate people who contributed to the same thing and left then you most likely have huge code debt. Managing that sort of thing is a daily task for any software engineer. Apparently your strategy is to just add debt onto the pile and put your head in the sand pretending it's not your problem. Instead you should plan tactical refactoring moves to make the codebase leaner and better able to adapt to the business needs, all without breaking any existing functionality and workflows. You're asking "when". That's the wrong question. It's up to you to manage your time and invest it into tasks that help you save time later on. A software engineer is usually not paid by the hour either, so you just do the work until you're satisfied with the effort you've put in.
layoric 3y ago
In my experience, the key is that it can also provide good explanations for the basics as well. You can fairly easily overwhelm it, but with some practise of prompting, learning new language/domain basics it is pretty good, and much better than googling to learn the same. The best of all is that you can query your understanding and get decent feedback.
shortcake27 3y ago
As an SWE, my problem isn’t boilerplate. It’s architecture and orchestration. I cancelled my Copilot subscription because it just doesn’t help with this. Let alone ChatGPT which has zero context about the application. I would like an AI to tell me if I’m reinventing the wheel or if something similar can be abstracted. Whether what I’m doing aligns with existing patterns in the codebase. How the application as a whole could be refactored to improve maintainability, performance, or both. This can all already be done by a human with experience and context, so it must be possible with AI. This will be the biggest game changer for me.
- slashdev 3y ago
  I can’t believe you canceled copilot, at $10 a month it pays for itself every single day for me. I’m just baffled how it can be so useful for me and not useful for you.
  - __loam 3y ago
    Once you get over the novelty it gets pretty annoying.
    - slashdev 3y ago
      I’ve been using it for a full year now, that’s just not been my experience.
  - TillE 3y ago
    I've found it extremely similar to IntelliCode for C#, which is not very impressive. Surprisingly I've found it does a better job of writing accurate comments than generating useful code. Maybe it's good for some languages, or for code that's doing the exact stuff a hundred people have already written. Copilot X certainly looks cool, but who knows when that'll be ready.
    - slashdev 3y ago
      I use it the other way around. I write the comments first and then I find it can often fill in the code. I find it especially helpful with SQL queries, and with boilerplate type code. It’s also very helpful when I’d need to lookup the usage of various methods. I just start with the comments and most of the time it saves me the context switch to the browser to lookup the usage.

an_aparallel 3y ago

Also as a learner - what i've found incredible is the ability to get AN ANSWER...without context switching. 1 window, 1 result location, no fishing...its trivial to test that given solution...as a beginner...my problems are fairly one dimensional. Not to mention...things like "cool want to learn python"..."wait - wtf..how do i setup a venv in python!!"

CTDOCodebases 3y ago

The good thing about ChatGPT is that you can keep asking it to explain something in a different way until it explains it in a way that “clicks” with you. Of course you then have to compare this explanation against all others and see if it fits or if it’s not a valid explanation. It’s also great for exploring topics which have polluted namespaces on search engines. Overall though I think the majour benefit of ChatGPT is it just teaches people to clearly define problems as natural language questions. Developing this ability helps the subconscious mind solve problems when the user is away from screens.

teleforce 3y ago
+1 for this, I think this is one of the most useful and underrated things enabled by ChatGPT for effective learning. One of the types of teaching video that I've found very helpful is where an expert, usually a professor explaining a concept (e.g zero knowledge proof) to five different audiences starting from school kids up to fellow researchers or professors. You can basically ask many different targeted levels of questions to ChatGPT for example, explain the concept as I am five years old, etc.
quijoteuniv 3y ago
Yes, but my impression is that chatGPT returns are really linked to the intelligence of the user. How good are to get things out of it. For a clever person starting to code you can easily jumps all the technical hops of the base knowdledge needed to start creating. In every discipline you need base knowdledge that allow you to be able to make the connections.
slashdev 3y ago
When you want to compare software or library X versus Y ChatGPT is excellent. Google is a morass of spam on those queries.
Guthur 3y ago
> Overall though I think the majour benefit of ChatGPT is it just teaches people to clearly define problems as natural language questions. Developing this ability helps the subconscious mind solve problems when the user is away from screens. Yeah we've had them for a while, it was called the rubber duck, ;)

SanderNL 3y ago

> It is simply far, far easier for a newbie to see a computer generate 1 / 3 / 5 slightly-different attempts to solve a specific problem they have, and then to pattern match sufficiently to be able to solve the problem themselves, than it is to muddle around by yourself with it for hours and hours with no end in sight. That's because it is easier. Multiple choice is easier than open questions. It's also a good way to not really grasp anything deeply.

dgb23 3y ago
But you don’t need to grasp anything deeply. You want to create something small and get a little bit of feedback quickly. When we teach math to children we don’t start with algebraic structures and proofs. We give them simple recipes. Later we show them problems that the recipes can’t solve and dig deeper. „By the way, the thing we did last year, it actually works like this…“
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  > When we teach math to children we don’t start with algebraic structures and proofs. We give them simple recipes. This is not mathematics, but arithmetic/calculating. When one starts teaching not-children-anymore mathematics (typically at the university), one indeed starts with something of the kind of algebraic structures and proofs.
  - dgb23 3y ago
    The GP mentioned that their wife is entirely new to programming but starting a CS degree. She will certainly learn the deeper concepts in university, but catching up with coding quickly, even in a shallow manner, is super beneficial. I think it's a huge plus.
    - zero_shift 3y ago
      I don't mean to neg anyone, but will someone pick up the fundamentals, if they can keep leaning on a chatbot?

cambaceres 3y ago

> ChatGPT doesn't do much for experienced SWEs, but it demolishes the difficulty curve for newbies. I wish I had this when I was learning. Yes and no. It doesn't help me that much with technologies that I'm senior within, but it has allowed me to work with a wider tech-stack. For example, I can now confidently write any SQL querys I want (so far anyway) although my prior knowledge in SQL isn't that deep.

insanitybit 3y ago

Experienced SWE here. ChatGPT is awesome for me. It's great for learning new technologies and it's great for writing programs that I'm too lazy to write myself.

seanthemon 3y ago
Hey, also an SSE here, do you find that writing code is becoming a grind now that GPT can generally handle most changes within a single context? I'm having a harder and harder time justifying writing a lot of code myself when faster tools are right at my fingertips Would love to hear how other SWE's who are using GPT feel about this
- insanitybit 3y ago
  I mostly use ChatGPT to write code while I'm playing video games. Cutscene/ load screen comes up and I review what it sent and have it iterate. Then back to games. It's much slower at producing good code than I am but it's much faster for me to write a prompt than a program, so ultimately it allows me to do two things at once because 'prompt time' is so short I can fit it in between other things. I don't think of programming as a grind unless I'm working in a shitty codebase, which does happen, certainly.

slashdev 3y ago

Graying SWE here. ChatGPT is quite helpful, and so is Copilot. I mostly use ChatGPT for well defined functions that I need to implement that don’t rely on too much external context. I love it for writing unittests. It frequently makes mistakes, but it’s easier than starting from zero.

sitkack 3y ago

If you are an experienced SWE and you aren’t getting something out of it, you are holding it wrong.