5 ms·

Which is extremely easy to do; just a misplaced `mv` is enough. I can't believe people are relying on GPT for ad hoc destructive I/O.

MonaroVXR 3y ago
>Which is extremely easy to do; just a misplaced `mv` is enough. Or `chown -r` or was it.. `chown -R`
pipes 3y ago
I used chat gpt to explain what a complex line in a bash script was doing. Though to be fair if I'd spent a day in man pages and Google I'd probably have learned a lot more than just being given the answer. Which makes think in the long run gpt may result in worse programmers.
- rascul 3y ago
  https://explainshell.com/ https://explainshell.com/ can help with that but isn't perfect.
- Ma8ee 3y ago
  In the same way as Stack Overflow has resulted in worse programmers, at least in some senses. I don’t mean to bash on SO, it’s really valuable sometimes. But corporate culture (faster is always better) and a new breed of programmers that don’t really care, have left us with a big part of the profession that are unable to produce anything new, or solve any unique problems.
  - swatcoder 3y ago
    And a generation before that, it was VB and (early) PHP programmers that earned that critique. It does feel like the proportions might be changing and the quality of software is trending downward, but I think you have it right that the risk of programmers being too "GPT-reliant" is the continuation of a long, intergenerational pattern.
    - an_aparallel 3y ago
      this is one of my BIGGEST frustrations learning to program. i do...not...want....to go online to work out hooow to do something. I want a "manual" - written well...that i can study and find the write tools to use...which for example (Pythons docs...are not...at least for beginners) - i then want to use the tools in said manual....to create. With the syntax, and the words you've defined oh so well in said manual. But...as the language grows...we'll just have to live with this never happening :) this is something i get jealous of older programmers who grew up on old computers, with printed manuals...when languages were smaller, and the scope of programs were also smaller...and didnt require external libraries.
      - ElectricalUnion 3y ago
        Programs were smaller with less expectations on them. Users were few and forcily clustered near the computer system. Attackers were limited and computer security was physical access control security. Now, it is kinda expected that programs support "text" - non-lgc alphabets, context-sensitive collations, ligatures and cursive text, mixed bidirectional text, combining characters, input method support, locale-dependent string interpolation logic. And one doen't simply handle all of that, not without bolting something else in your program that is probably larger that your program. And that isn't even instants in time; those are much harder to handle correctly all the time.
        Ma8ee 3y ago
        I’d say that we are programming on a higher level of abstraction today, so the programs do in some senses do more, but the size of the code we wrote then and now, and the complexities are of the same order of magnitude.
      - Ma8ee 3y ago
        Books are still written, and there are quite a few online courses, and some of them aren't bad. I've learned that to be productive in a new language or framework I really need to dive into some of those resources. The manuals you find online are rarely good enough to learn from, and all the tutorials and "getting started" just scratches enough on the surface to make me frustrated.
- keybored 3y ago
  Bash doesn’t deserve the brainspace that truly knowing it would demand.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- simonw 3y ago
  What's better: spending a day figuring out a single line of a complex Bash script, or spending that same day learning literally 100x more because you didn't have to waste that much effort on each individual thing? For me, the alternative to using ChatGPT to figure some weird piece of Bash trivial out isn't doing the work myself, meticulously and at great length. It's losing interest and not figuring that thing out at all.
  - eternityforest 3y ago
    Losing interest and not figuring it out at all has been my approach to nontrivial bash. I'm not a UNIX philosophy fan in general, but trying to bea programming language and also a UI, all in one, is a bit much. It's ok-ish as a UI for cases where GUI doesn't work or you want a machine to be able to use the UI, but as a language it's missing a lot of stuff.
  - Rediscover 3y ago
    Other option: asking the grey beard down the hall how to do it. Fifteen minutes, and all parties are happy.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Analemma_ 3y ago
Have you actually tried it? Because this comment seems pretty misplaced with the reality of what ChatGPT can accomplish. I also use it all the time for bash one-liners, and so far my experience has been "80% work correctly on the first try, 15% require minor adjustment to run, 5% require major adjustment to run" and so far none have ever done anything flagrantly wrong or destructive. It also doesn't just print a command with no context: it explains what each flag/step of the command is purportedly doing, which you can (and should!) use to double-check that what you're about to run makes sense. Which is more than I can say for a lot of SO answers!
- anjanb 3y ago
  I've used chatGPT(ver 4 through ChATGPT plus) for creating .bat files. Really easy ones, it can churn out quite well. A lil more complicated - it doesn't consider edge cases. Several cases require me to ask it to generate a golang program that gets called by the .bat file. Several times, I had to spend hours to get a .bat script working. Hopefully, it will get better in the future.
- swatcoder 3y ago
  Traditionally, the alternative wasn't "SO answers", which are indeed dangerous in their own way -- it was to develop, and then maintain, a comprehensive and fluent understanding of the tools suitable to your profession. GPT and SO can help you make a deadline today, and we all may use them now and then, but consistently relying on them steals essential opportunities for professional growth. A journeyman woodworker who just asked somebody else to perform all his tricky jigsaw cuts is going to have a hard time developing the muscle memory and intuitions that mark mastery of the craft.
  - simonw 3y ago
    I'd rather get to AI-assisted mastery of many more different crafts than limit myself to achieving mastery of just one single thing.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    A master carpenter that only uses hand tools is a master of their craft, and should be respected as such, but refusing to ever use power tools because of a moral objection to electricity would be seen as quite the eccentricity. Which, the Amish sell furniture, and it's really quite good, if niche, furniture.
cactusfrog 3y ago
It’s really useful for learning. “Describe this complex bash command I found on stack overflow line-by-line”. Write a quiz question to make sure I understand it. Rate my response to this quiz question.
- arcanemachiner 3y ago
  > Write a quiz question to make sure I understand it. Rate my response to this quiz question. I like this idea. Definitely gonna steal it. I love that "extensions" can be implemented just by writing a couple extra words.
- dotancohen 3y ago
  This is what I come to HN for. I'll see if ChatGPT could maybe generate some relevant Anki cards as well.
arcanemachiner 3y ago
There's a big difference between "build this program for me" and "explain how this line of bash code works". I use LLMs for the latter, and they often do a great job and save a lot of time looking up individual flags, concepts, etc.
- Too 3y ago
  Both could be equally wrong and hallucinated.
  - thedaly 3y ago
    > Both could be equally wrong and hallucinated. As can I. I recently broke my years long streak of not deleting something by accident with an errant bash command. Just because a tool has the potential for a negative outcome doesn't mean it shouldn't be used. It just means appropriate caution should be used as well.
  - williamcotton 3y ago
    This statement implies that LLM hallucinations are completely random which is objectively false. LLMs fill in the blanks when left to synthesize a response from a prompt as opposed to translating a response from a prompt. These synthesized responses, aka hallucinations, are predictable in nature. Quotes, titles of books, web page links, etc. Conversely, providing an LLM with all of the facts necessary to complete a response will result in few to no hallucinations. For example: Select name and row_id from table1 joined on table2 on table1_id. This will never return "DROP table1;". It will basically only ever return something very close to what you want.
    - williamcotton 3y ago
      Why the downvotes? The comment is not rude and it is factually correct.
    - Too 3y ago
      Not my downvotes but this is factually incorrect. A LLM will give you the highest likely suggestion. If that happens to be a DROP, it will not stop. Now that is of course going to be extremely unlikely in your example. What is more likely though is that your SELECT may include a sql injection vulnerability, even more so once your prompts get more complex. The chance of that happening or not, is completely random from a users point of view. Are we going to blame the user for not providing the requirement “without vulnerabilities”? Even if they did, it’s not sure to be fulfilled. In this parent case, the scenario was inverted. Given a sql query, will gpt explain if it has vulnerabilities or not? Will it even explain the gist of it correct? Who knows if it will hallucinate or not? As will answers from stackoverflow, always read the comments, always review yourself. Use gpt all you want. I do it it myself, it’s great for suggestions. Just think that using gpt to explain things you don’t understand and can’t verify easily, can be risky. Even more so in bash where the difference making a destructive command can be a lot more subtle than select vs drop.
AlecSchueler 3y ago
I haven't tried GPT for this purpose but I don't think we need to assume that everyone tinkering with it are blindly copy pasting potentially destructive commands. Anyone who does that now would already have done it from random Google results anyway.

MonaroVXR 3y ago

>Which is extremely easy to do; just a misplaced `mv` is enough. Or `chown -r` or was it.. `chown -R`

pipes 3y ago

I used chat gpt to explain what a complex line in a bash script was doing. Though to be fair if I'd spent a day in man pages and Google I'd probably have learned a lot more than just being given the answer. Which makes think in the long run gpt may result in worse programmers.

rascul 3y ago
https://explainshell.com/ https://explainshell.com/ can help with that but isn't perfect.
Ma8ee 3y ago
In the same way as Stack Overflow has resulted in worse programmers, at least in some senses. I don’t mean to bash on SO, it’s really valuable sometimes. But corporate culture (faster is always better) and a new breed of programmers that don’t really care, have left us with a big part of the profession that are unable to produce anything new, or solve any unique problems.
- swatcoder 3y ago
  And a generation before that, it was VB and (early) PHP programmers that earned that critique. It does feel like the proportions might be changing and the quality of software is trending downward, but I think you have it right that the risk of programmers being too "GPT-reliant" is the continuation of a long, intergenerational pattern.
  - an_aparallel 3y ago
    this is one of my BIGGEST frustrations learning to program. i do...not...want....to go online to work out hooow to do something. I want a "manual" - written well...that i can study and find the write tools to use...which for example (Pythons docs...are not...at least for beginners) - i then want to use the tools in said manual....to create. With the syntax, and the words you've defined oh so well in said manual. But...as the language grows...we'll just have to live with this never happening :) this is something i get jealous of older programmers who grew up on old computers, with printed manuals...when languages were smaller, and the scope of programs were also smaller...and didnt require external libraries.
    - ElectricalUnion 3y ago
      Programs were smaller with less expectations on them. Users were few and forcily clustered near the computer system. Attackers were limited and computer security was physical access control security. Now, it is kinda expected that programs support "text" - non-lgc alphabets, context-sensitive collations, ligatures and cursive text, mixed bidirectional text, combining characters, input method support, locale-dependent string interpolation logic. And one doen't simply handle all of that, not without bolting something else in your program that is probably larger that your program. And that isn't even instants in time; those are much harder to handle correctly all the time.
      - Ma8ee 3y ago
        I’d say that we are programming on a higher level of abstraction today, so the programs do in some senses do more, but the size of the code we wrote then and now, and the complexities are of the same order of magnitude.
    - Ma8ee 3y ago
      Books are still written, and there are quite a few online courses, and some of them aren't bad. I've learned that to be productive in a new language or framework I really need to dive into some of those resources. The manuals you find online are rarely good enough to learn from, and all the tutorials and "getting started" just scratches enough on the surface to make me frustrated.
keybored 3y ago
Bash doesn’t deserve the brainspace that truly knowing it would demand.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
simonw 3y ago
What's better: spending a day figuring out a single line of a complex Bash script, or spending that same day learning literally 100x more because you didn't have to waste that much effort on each individual thing? For me, the alternative to using ChatGPT to figure some weird piece of Bash trivial out isn't doing the work myself, meticulously and at great length. It's losing interest and not figuring that thing out at all.
- eternityforest 3y ago
  Losing interest and not figuring it out at all has been my approach to nontrivial bash. I'm not a UNIX philosophy fan in general, but trying to bea programming language and also a UI, all in one, is a bit much. It's ok-ish as a UI for cases where GUI doesn't work or you want a machine to be able to use the UI, but as a language it's missing a lot of stuff.
- Rediscover 3y ago
  Other option: asking the grey beard down the hall how to do it. Fifteen minutes, and all parties are happy.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

Analemma_ 3y ago

Have you actually tried it? Because this comment seems pretty misplaced with the reality of what ChatGPT can accomplish. I also use it all the time for bash one-liners, and so far my experience has been "80% work correctly on the first try, 15% require minor adjustment to run, 5% require major adjustment to run" and so far none have ever done anything flagrantly wrong or destructive. It also doesn't just print a command with no context: it explains what each flag/step of the command is purportedly doing, which you can (and should!) use to double-check that what you're about to run makes sense. Which is more than I can say for a lot of SO answers!

anjanb 3y ago
I've used chatGPT(ver 4 through ChATGPT plus) for creating .bat files. Really easy ones, it can churn out quite well. A lil more complicated - it doesn't consider edge cases. Several cases require me to ask it to generate a golang program that gets called by the .bat file. Several times, I had to spend hours to get a .bat script working. Hopefully, it will get better in the future.
swatcoder 3y ago
Traditionally, the alternative wasn't "SO answers", which are indeed dangerous in their own way -- it was to develop, and then maintain, a comprehensive and fluent understanding of the tools suitable to your profession. GPT and SO can help you make a deadline today, and we all may use them now and then, but consistently relying on them steals essential opportunities for professional growth. A journeyman woodworker who just asked somebody else to perform all his tricky jigsaw cuts is going to have a hard time developing the muscle memory and intuitions that mark mastery of the craft.
- simonw 3y ago
  I'd rather get to AI-assisted mastery of many more different crafts than limit myself to achieving mastery of just one single thing.
- fragmede 3y ago
  A master carpenter that only uses hand tools is a master of their craft, and should be respected as such, but refusing to ever use power tools because of a moral objection to electricity would be seen as quite the eccentricity. Which, the Amish sell furniture, and it's really quite good, if niche, furniture.

cactusfrog 3y ago

It’s really useful for learning. “Describe this complex bash command I found on stack overflow line-by-line”. Write a quiz question to make sure I understand it. Rate my response to this quiz question.

arcanemachiner 3y ago
> Write a quiz question to make sure I understand it. Rate my response to this quiz question. I like this idea. Definitely gonna steal it. I love that "extensions" can be implemented just by writing a couple extra words.
dotancohen 3y ago
This is what I come to HN for. I'll see if ChatGPT could maybe generate some relevant Anki cards as well.

arcanemachiner 3y ago

There's a big difference between "build this program for me" and "explain how this line of bash code works". I use LLMs for the latter, and they often do a great job and save a lot of time looking up individual flags, concepts, etc.

Too 3y ago
Both could be equally wrong and hallucinated.
- thedaly 3y ago
  > Both could be equally wrong and hallucinated. As can I. I recently broke my years long streak of not deleting something by accident with an errant bash command. Just because a tool has the potential for a negative outcome doesn't mean it shouldn't be used. It just means appropriate caution should be used as well.
- williamcotton 3y ago
  This statement implies that LLM hallucinations are completely random which is objectively false. LLMs fill in the blanks when left to synthesize a response from a prompt as opposed to translating a response from a prompt. These synthesized responses, aka hallucinations, are predictable in nature. Quotes, titles of books, web page links, etc. Conversely, providing an LLM with all of the facts necessary to complete a response will result in few to no hallucinations. For example: Select name and row_id from table1 joined on table2 on table1_id. This will never return "DROP table1;". It will basically only ever return something very close to what you want.
  - williamcotton 3y ago
    Why the downvotes? The comment is not rude and it is factually correct.
  - Too 3y ago
    Not my downvotes but this is factually incorrect. A LLM will give you the highest likely suggestion. If that happens to be a DROP, it will not stop. Now that is of course going to be extremely unlikely in your example. What is more likely though is that your SELECT may include a sql injection vulnerability, even more so once your prompts get more complex. The chance of that happening or not, is completely random from a users point of view. Are we going to blame the user for not providing the requirement “without vulnerabilities”? Even if they did, it’s not sure to be fulfilled. In this parent case, the scenario was inverted. Given a sql query, will gpt explain if it has vulnerabilities or not? Will it even explain the gist of it correct? Who knows if it will hallucinate or not? As will answers from stackoverflow, always read the comments, always review yourself. Use gpt all you want. I do it it myself, it’s great for suggestions. Just think that using gpt to explain things you don’t understand and can’t verify easily, can be risky. Even more so in bash where the difference making a destructive command can be a lot more subtle than select vs drop.

AlecSchueler 3y ago

I haven't tried GPT for this purpose but I don't think we need to assume that everyone tinkering with it are blindly copy pasting potentially destructive commands. Anyone who does that now would already have done it from random Google results anyway.