4 ms·
> OpenAI, at least in my day-day workflow for the last 9+ months has so superseded anything that google ever was to me that I'm having a difficult time comparin
by busyant 3y ago
> OpenAI, at least in my day-day workflow for the last 9+ months has so superseded anything that google ever was to me that I'm having a difficult time comparing the two.
Seconded.
Let me tell you what I used to do.
First, Imagine I have an error executing code or an error running some bit of 3rd party software. I go to Stack Overflow and search. I find posts related to my problem and I spend a great deal of time trying to shoehorn existing answers to my specific issue. Sometimes, my shoehorning works and I fix my problem. Other times, it doesn't work, and then I post on Stack Overflow myself. And I wait ... and wait ... for a response. Sometimes I get a response.
Now, when I have this type of problem, I tell ChatGPT, "Hey, I'm trying to do <xyz> and I'm getting this error <abc>. Help me troubleshoot this. And it almost always helps me fix my problem. And it's ~10× faster than Stack Overflow.
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Second, there are times where I have write code to do some relatively 'complex' data manipulation--nothing sophisticated, mind you, but stuff like, "I need these data columns rearranged based on complicated logic. And I need the text in columns A, X, AQ, and F merged, but only if <blah blah is true>. Otherwise, Just merge text in Columns A and AQ, except if the date in column ZZ is after January 1, 2019.". I can do this stuff on my own, but: a] it's cognitively draining, b] it takes time, c] I often make silly errors due to the complexity.
ChatGPT is, again, an order of magnitude faster than I am. And it makes _fewer_ errors.
It still makes errors. And I still have to know what to look for to catch those errors, but it decreases my cognitive load tremendously.
edit: I haven't used Stack Overflow in 6 months. And "Googling" is Plan B.
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Edit 2: I recently had to write a sympathy letter to someone whose husband died.
I knew the general ideas behind what I wanted to say, but I knew I wasn't going to write anything great.
I fired up ChatGPT and said,
"write a sympathy letter to <x>. Tell her that I didn't know her husband well, but the few times I met him, I could tell that he cared deeply about you<x> and his daughter. I know his daughter well and I think she gets a lot of her great qualities from him and you. Tell her I don't know what to say in times like this. Keep it short-ish. Avoid schmaltz and sentimentality because <x> isn't that kind of person."
It gave me about as perfect a letter as I could have asked for.
- Rastonbury 3y agoAs a non-professional coder, I'm honestly surprised there seems quite a few professional coders in this thread who don't do the first Stackoverflow first scenario. As someone learning code, shoehorning SO code when I don't understand 20% of the replies made the learning curve so steep, chatGPT has made this so much easier by changing it and telling me why will/won't work, even when watching out for or correcting hallucinations, overall its a time save
- meiraleal 3y ago> I'm honestly surprised there seems quite a few professional coders in this thread who don't do the first Stackoverflow first scenario You just found your path to become a better developer than the majority then
- smrq 3y agoAs I've matured in my career I've gone to SO less and less, to the point where I mostly avoid it now. I use tools, languages, and libraries with which I am now highly familiar--perhaps more so than the average SO answerer, although I guess it would be arrogant to say for sure--and so the bulk of my questions are edge cases in my knowledge which are more easily answered by reading source code or specs. I suspect this is one of the differences between people that find GPT helpful and people that don't--it seems much more potentially helpful when you are in a less familiar environment. In my work, when I run into unexpected behavior, if I knew what question to ask then I would probably already know the answer too. Until the day I can feed in an entire codebase and ask "What's wrong with this? vaguely gestures at everything", I don't expect that to change significantly.
- Rastonbury 3y agoThat makes sense, and its funny because the other reply I got a joke was about how bad coders don't even bother going to SO
- aprdm 3y agoProbably because you're deep specialized in something or have stagnated on a company for a long time ? I cannot imagine knowing everything about what I am working on, that has changed dramatically every 3-4 months even within the same company
- sangnoir 3y agoWhen you've been working for a while - not necessarily even for the same company- you gather an internal library of knowledge that you can pattern match against for solutions. You may not have seen the exact same thing, but you may have seen something like it. There are hardly ever an entirely novel class of bugs anymore