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That's about my experience. The worst dev on my team uses ChatGPT a lot, and its facilitated him producing more bad code more quickly. I'm not sure it's a win
by steveBK123 3y ago
That's about my experience.
The worst dev on my team uses ChatGPT a lot, and its facilitated him producing more bad code more quickly. I'm not sure it's a win for anyone, and he's still unlikely to be with the team in a year.
It allows a dev who doesn't care about their craft or improving to generate code without learning anything. The code they generate today or a year from today is the same quality.
Part of it is that it allows devs who lean into overcomplicating things to do so even more. The solutions are never a refinement of what already exists, but patch on top of patch on top of patch of complexity. ChatGPT is not going to tell you how to design a system, architect properly, automate, package, test, deploy, etc.
For the team it means there's a larger mess of a code base to rewrite.
- happycube 3y agoOn the flip side, one can use ChatGPT as only a starting point and to learn from there. One isn't stuck with actually using what it outputs verbtim, and really shouldn't until at least a hypothetical GPT-6 or 7... and to use it fully now, one has to know how to nudge it when it goes into a bad direction. So overall it's more an amplifier than anything else.
- lucideer 3y ago> So overall it's more an amplifier than anything else. Overall it would be an amplifier if that were how the majority used it. Sadly I don't believe that to be the case.
- steveBK123 3y agoIf the results were more akin to a google or stack overflow where there was a list of results with context.. sure. But people are using the singular response as "the answer" and moving on..
- thebigspacefuck 3y agoPhind is a bit more like this
- JadeNB 3y ago> If the results were more akin to a google or stack overflow where there was a list of results with context.. sure. I don't think the history of the usage of either shows that most people make any use of that context.
- happycube 3y agoEspecially these days you have to know how to use/read Google and SO results too. (And I should have said ChatGPT4 earlier, if you're a bad to medicore developer taking ChatGPT3.5 literally you'll probably wind up in a Very Bad Place.)
- komali2 3y agoI have a lot of juniors floating around my co-op and when I watch them use chatgpt it seems it becomes a dependency. In my opinion it's harming their ability to learn. Rather than thinking through problems they'll just toss every single roadblock they hit instantly into a chatgpt prompt. To be fair I've been doing the same thing with simple mathematics into a calculator in my browser that at this point I'm pretty sure I'd fail at long division by hand. Maybe it won't matter in a few years and their chatgpt skills will be well honed, but if it were me in their position I wouldn't gamble on it.
- steveBK123 3y agoYeah that's my larger point about the guy and the pattern. It doesn't lead to growth. I've seen zero growth whatsoever. And he slacks coworkers like he is talking to ChatGPT too, slinging code blobs without context, example input data, or the actual error he received..
- raducu 3y ago> Yeah that's my larger point about the guy and the pattern. It doesn't lead to growth. I've seen zero growth whatsoever. If Chat GPT can solve a problem consistently well, I don't think it's worth the effort to master it. My examples are regexes, command lines to manipulate files, kafka/zookeeper commands to explore a test environment. For me it's a big win in that regard.
- chrisfinazzo 3y agoThis has been my experience as well - For repetitive things, If what you're looking for is the shitty first draft, it's a way to get things started. After that, you can shape the output - without GPT's help - into something that you can pull off the shelf again as needed and drop it into where you want it to go, because at that point in the process, you know it works.
- raducu 3y ago> nudge it when it goes into a bad direction It happenes a few times for me that Chat GPT gets stuck in a bullshit loop and I can't get it unstuck. Sure I could summarise the previous session for Chat GPT and try again, but I'm too tired at that point.
- ben_w 3y agoI get that with humans sometimes too. Even here, even before LLMs became popular. Someone gets primed on some keyword, then goes off on a direction unrelated to whatever it was I had in mind and I can't get them to change focus — and at least one occasion (here) where I kept saying ~"that's not what I'm talking about" only to be eventually met (after three rounds of this) with the accusation that I was moving the goalposts :P
- somestag 3y agoYeah, regardless of hallucinations and repeating the same mistake even after you tell it to fix it, iterating with ChatGPT is so much less stressful than iterating with another engineer. I almost ruined my relationship with a coworker because they submitted some code that took a dependency on something it shouldn't have, and I told them to remove the dependency. What I meant was "do the same thing you did, but instead of using this method, just do what this method does inside your own code." But they misinterpreted it to mean "Don't do what this method does, build a completely different solution." Repeated attempts to clarify what I meant only dug the hole deeper because to them I was just complaining that their solution was different from how I would've done it. Eventually I just showed them in code what I was asking for (it was a very small change!) and they got mad at me for making such a big deal over 3 lines of code. Of course the whole point was that it was a small change that would avoid a big problem down the road... So I'll take ChatGPT using library methods that don't exist, no matter how much you tell them to fix it, over that kind of stress any day.
- throwuwu 3y agoUse the edit button
- itsoktocry 3y ago>One isn't stuck with actually using what it outputs verbtim, and really shouldn't until at least a hypothetical GPT-6 or 7... and to use it fully now, one has to know how to nudge it when it goes into a bad direction. Exactly. chatGPT is the single smartest person you can ask about anything, and has unlimited patience.
- mlinhares 3y agoBless this person your team, he is creating work out of thin air and will keep your team and possibly other teams employed for a really long time
- steveBK123 3y agoExactly - and people say AI will take away jobs!
- ben_w 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
- lytefm 3y agoThis could even play out on a broader scale and even increase the demand for software engineers. What is going to happen if more and more people are creating lots of software that delivers value but is difficult to maintain and extend? First it's going to be more high-level stuff, then more plumbing, more debugging and stitching together half-baked solutions than ever before. AI might make our jobs suck more, but it's not going to replace them.
- andy99 3y ago> The worst dev on my team uses ChatGPT a lot, and its facilitated him producing more bad code more quickly. This is great. The exact same is true with writing, which I think it's trivial for anyone to see. Especially non-native speakers or otherwise bad writers can now write long-winded nonsense, which we're starting to see all over. It hasn't made anyone a good writer, it's just helped bad ones go faster.
- JohnMakin 3y agoI use “chatGPT” (really bing chat which is openAI under the hood as I understand) more than anyone on my team but it is very rarely for code. I most often use it for summarizing/searching through dense documentation, creating quick prototypes, “given X,Y,Z symptoms and this confusing error message, can you give me a list of possible causes?” (basically searches Stack Overflow far better than I can). Anyway basically the same as I was using google when google was actually good. sometimes I will forget some obscure syntax and ask it how to do something, but not super often. I’m convinced using it solely to generate code is a mistake unless it’s tedious boilerplate stuff.
- necrotic_comp 3y agoYes, agreed. The best way of putting this is "using google when google was actually good."
- Tostino 3y agoBing is far and away worse than gpt4 through ChatGPT or the API, just FYI. Don't even consider it comparable, even if they say it is the same model under the hood. Their "optimizations" have crippled it's capabilities if that is the case.
- JohnMakin 3y agoWell, it works pretty well for me, and cites its sources with links, and I have yet to catch it making up something.
- gessha 3y agoI have a hunch that using ChatGPT might be a skill in of itself and it doesn’t necessarily hurt or help any particular skill level of developers. In previous replies in this thread the claim is it helps novices compete with associates or associates with seniors but in reality, it will probably help any tier of skill level. You just have to figure out how to prompt it
- whynotminot 3y agoOne hundred percent. Most people I’ve seen dismiss ChatGPT simply refuse to engage it appropriately. It’s not likely to solve your most complex problem with a single prompt. Asking the right questions is such an important skill in and of itself. I think we’re seeing to some extent the old joke about engineers not knowing how to talk to people manifest itself a bit with a lot of engineers right now not knowing quite how to get good results from ChatGPT. Sort of looking around the room wondering what they’re missing since it seems quite dumb to them.
- Workaccount2 3y agoThey use GPT 3.5, prompt it with "Write a javascript login page" and then look at the code an go "Damn, this thing is stupid as fuck".
- somestag 3y agoI had a friend jokingly poke fun at me for the way I was writing ChatGPT prompts. It seemed, to him, like I was going out of my way to be nice and helpful to an AI. It was a bit of an aha moment for him when I told him that helping the AI along gave much more useful answers, and he saw I was right.
- whynotminot 3y ago> ChatGPT is not going to tell you how to design a system, architect properly, automate, package, test, deploy, etc. If you ask the right questions it absolutely can. I’ve found that most people thinking ChatGPT is a rube are expecting too much extrapolation from vague prompts. “Make me a RESTful service that provides music data.” ChatGPT will give you something that does that. And then you’ll proceed to come to hacker news and talk about all the dumb things it did. But, if you have a conversation with it. Tell it more of the things you’re considering. Some of the trades off you’re making—how the schema might grow over time, it’s kind of remarkable. You need to treat it like a real whiteboarding session. I also find it incredibly useful for getting my code into more mainstream shape. I have my own quirks that I’ve developed over time learning a million different things in a dozen different programming languages. It’s nice to be able to hand your code to ChatGPT and simply ask “is this idiomatic for this language?” I think the people most disappointed with ChatGPT are trying to treat it like a Unix CLI instead of another developer to whiteboard with.
- cbozeman 3y agoThis has been my experience as well. Every person I've noticed who says that ChatGPT isn't good at what it does has the same thing in common - they're not great at talking to people, either. Turns out when you train an AI on the corpus of human knowledge, you have to actually talk to it like a human. Which entirely too many people visiting this website don't do effectively. ChatGPT has allowed me to develop comprehensive training programs for our internal personnel, because I already have some knowledge of training and standardization from my time in the military, but I also have in-depth domain knowledge so I can double-check what it's recommending, then course correct it if necessary.
- rewmie 3y ago> Every person I've noticed who says that ChatGPT isn't good at what it does has the same thing in common - they're not great at talking to people, either. I think that the people who nowadays shit on ChatGPT's code generating abilities are the same blend of people who, a couple decades ago, wasted their time complaining that hand-rolled assembly would beat any compiled code in any way, shape, or form, provided that people knew what they were doing.
- itsoktocry 3y ago>ChatGPT is not going to tell you how to design a system, architect properly, automate, package, test, deploy, etc. Really? Please explain how chatGPT can not, but you can? What magic is it that you know that it's incapable of explaining?
- RugnirViking 3y agobecause it seems to have built in assumptions about the scale, scope and complexity of soluton you are trying to develop. Specifically, unless you tell it to think about automated testing, or architecting, or making code be loosely coupled, it will hack. this is because a lot of the time what a beginner needs IS a hack. But if you always hack at your job, things stop working. I want to reiterate. One of the reasons the LLM is so helpful is because it has been RLHF'ed into always treating you as a beginner. This is core to it's usefulness. But it also limits it from producing quality work unless you bombard it with an enormous prompt explaining all of the difference between a beginne's and an expert's code. Which is tedious and lengthy to do every time when you just want a short change that doesnt suck. Humans are able to learn from all sorts of external cues what level they should pitch an idea at. Startups should focus on hacky code, for velocity. Large buisnesses should focus on robust processes.