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Using chatgpt to code is not a skill. It’s a crutch. Any employees that feel held back by not being able to access it aren’t great in the first place.
by kortilla 3y ago
Using chatgpt to code is not a skill. It’s a crutch. Any employees that feel held back by not being able to access it aren’t great in the first place.
- sinfulprogeny 3y agoUsing $technological_aide \in {chatgpt,ide,stackoverflow,google,debuggers,compilers,optimizers,high-mem VMs}$ to code is not a skill. It’s a crutch. Any employees that feel held back by not being able to access it aren’t great in the first place.
- noduerme 3y agoI don't think using ChatGPT is similar to searching for answers on S.O. Maybe if you were asking people on S.O. to write your code for you, or plugging in exact snippets. The point here is that letting ChatGPT write code directly into your repo is effectively plagiarism and may violate any number of licenses you don't even realize you're breaking, whereas just looking at how other people did something, understanding, and then writing your own code, does not.
- hanselot 3y agoI've been experiencing carpal tunnel on and off for a couple of weeks now. I can tell you that reading through some code generated by "insert llm x" is substantially less painful than writing all of it by my own hand. Especially if you start understanding how to refine your prompts to the point where you use a single thread for project management and use that thread to generate prompts for other threads. Not all value to be gained from this is purely copypasta.
- clbrmbr 3y agoSame here. End of last year I had to take more time off than I wanted to because of my wrists and hands. Copilot and GPT4 (combined with good compression braces) got me back in the game.
- bombolo 3y agoTake sick leave
- ddingus 3y agoBoy, those easy answers are right there! Can't miss 'em. A guy could wonder why so many of us do not use those answers. Could it be the details complicate things just enough to take the easy answer off the table? Perhaps it is just me. What say you?
- DougBTX 3y agoHonestly I couldn’t tell you whether copying code out of Stack Overflow or out of ChatGPT is more legally suspect. For SO, you don’t know where the user got the code from either (wrote it themselves? Copied it out of their work repo? Copied from some random GPL source?)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- noduerme 3y agoWell, this is why you don't copy code from S.O. You read it, understand why it works, then write your own.
- peoplefromibiza 3y ago> It’s a crutch problem is most of the code chatgpt spouts is wrong, in so many subtle ways, that sometimes you just have to run it to prove it. so basically you have to be better than chatgpt at that particular task to spot its mistakes. using it blindly it's similar to the Gell-Mann amnesia effect https://theportal.wiki/wiki/The_Gell-Mann_Amnesia_Effect https://theportal.wiki/wiki/The_Gell-Mann_Amnesia_Effect said by someone who uses chatgpt extensively, it is good for the structure, to get an idea, but as a code generator it kinda sucks.
- moratorii 3y agoThank you. I am not a programmer and only know some very rudimentary HTML and Java. After hearing everyone enthuse about how they use ChatGPT for everything, I thought that I could use it to generate a page that I thought sounded simple enough. Gist of it was that I needed 100 boxes of the same dimensions that text could be inputted into. I figured that it'd be faster with AI than with me setting up an excel sheet that others would have to access. Instead, the AI kept spitting out slightly-off code, and no matter how much reiterations I did it did not improve. Had I known the programming language, I would have known what needed to be changed. I think that a lot of highly experienced people are using it as a short-hand to get started, and a lot of inexperienced people are going to use it to produce a lot of shoddy crap. Anyone relying on ChatGPT that doesn't already know what they're doing is setting themselves up for failure.
- Hoasi 3y ago> said by someone who uses chatgpt extensively, it is good for the structure, to get an idea, but as a code generator it kinda sucks. Interestingly, the same applies to text-to-image programs. Once you used these for a while, you realize their utility and value are little more than an inspiration or a starter. Even if you wanted to ignore the ethical implications, very little they produce is useable. LLM are amazing. However, their end-product application is overrated.
- kortilla 3y agoStackoverflow yes, the others aren’t the same category. Asking someone else to give you code to do X means you have struggled synthesizing algorithms yourself. It’s not a good habit because it means you struggle to be precise in how the program behaves.
- morelisp 3y agoHorrible metaphor aside, at our company it's not the software developers most overusing ChatGPT.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoI'd avoid the use of the word crutch, it sounds ableist as fuck; my girlfriend has a joint disease and relies on a crutch to walk. In other words, while I understand it's just a figure of speech: how dare you. It's a tool that can help, just like an IDE, code generators, code formatters, etc. No need to talk down on it in that fashion, and there's no need to look down your nose at tools or the people that use it.
- stavros 3y agoWhy is the word "crutch" ableist, when the meaning is exactly analogous? It's a tool to help you do something you can't easily do yourself.
- mmmmmbop 3y agoHow is it offensive to use crutch in this context? The implication being that it's a tool that helps people do something they'd struggle with otherwise. I don't see why anyone might be offended by that.
- spullara 3y agoSomeone that doesn't use the tools available to them would be like folks hammering in nails with their forehead.
- concordDance 3y agoYour girlfriend is less able to walk and thus uses a crutch to compensate, but it doesn't let her walk as well as a normal person. Replace "walk" with "code" and the sentence works for ChatGPT if the grandparent is correct.
- matkoniecz 3y ago> It's a tool that can help, just like an IDE, code generators, code formatters, etc And like crutch for someone who cannot walk without it. Or glasses (which I use) and allow me to regain almost as good vision as someone with no deformity of eyeballs.
- stormfather 3y agoAnyone who can't figure out how to become more efficient with the aid of LLMs is a dinosaur.
- fhd2 3y agoI dunno about that. I honestly tried to extract _any_ value in my day to day work from LLMs, but aside from being an OK alternative to Google/SO, I mostly did find it to be a crutch. I never had issues with quickly writing a draft or typing in code. I do realise that for a lot of people, starting on a green field is hard, but for me it's easier. My going hypotheses is that people are just different, and some get true value out of it while others don't. If it works for you, I'm not gonna call you names for it.
- matkoniecz 3y agoI guess that it depends on how popular your thing. If you are doing something not done before or really unique, then hope for useful hints is lower. If you do something done 10000 times before or is mix of two things done over and over then you are more likely to get advise.
- generic92034 3y agoYes, try it with a proprietary language, a closed source environment and lots of domain and application knowledge required to achieve anything. There ChatGPT is completely out of it.
- Hoasi 3y agoExactly. It's a time-saver for bureaucratic chores. And that's great. There is no need to strive for excellence when mediocrity is required. Useless for anything that requires originality, elaborate humor, or finesse.
- spullara 3y agoCan you share your linkedin?
- fxnn 3y agoSounds like the perspective of someone who never gave that tool a real chance. To me it’s primarily just another aid like IDE inspections, IDE autocompletions etc. I use GitHub Autopilot mainly for smaller chunks of code, another kind of autocompletion, which basically safes me from typing, Googling or looking into the docs, and therefore keeps me in the flow.
- tomjen3 3y agoHere is a bunch of JSON. Output the c# classes that can deserialise it. An intern in college could do that, but it isn’t worth our time to do. For this function, write the unit tests. Now you do not have anything that you can blindly commit, but you are at the stage where you are reviewing code. Could you do all of this by hand? Sure but you never would, you would use an IDE. Chatgpt is better than an IDE when you know how to use it.
- cebert 3y agoI think it can be a productivity booster. At my company, I need to touch multiple projects in multiple languages. I can ask ChatGPT how to do something, such as enumerate an array, in a language I’m less familiar with so that I can more quickly contribute to a project. Using ChatGPT as a coach, I am also slowly learning new things.
- throw__away7391 3y agoI remember people saying literally the exact same thing almost word for word about Google almost a quarter century ago.
- bombolo 3y agoYou mean the search engine that NEVER EVER gives me the documentation I'm locking for, but always goes for a vaguely related blog with hundreds of ads?