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> That said, I have fed thousands of lines of code into both of them and asked them to refactor it, and neither one of them made more than one error. All code o

> That said, I have fed thousands of lines of code into both of them and asked them to refactor it, and neither one of them made more than one error. All code otherwise compiled and worked first try. I would be very interested to get a more detailed scope of what you did here. Feeding thousands of lines of code into GPT4 and getting a near perfect refactor does very much NOT sound like my experience, but it seems highly desirable.

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maxwelljoslyn 3y ago
Seconded. I am also keenly interested in learning more. It would be a great boon on my current project to be able to let the AI refactor mountains of legacy code (while taking steps to ensure the results are trustworthy and equivalent, of course.)
maaanu 3y ago
Yes, I've observed the same phenomenon. The more detailed my prompts are, the more errors GPT tends to make. I use it as a partner to discuss implementation ideas, before I start coding. That works very well, because gpt and I usually find somethings, that I missed at a first glance. But coding with gpt or co-pilot is too disrupted for me.
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
  > The more detailed my prompts are, the more errors GPT tends to make. I use it as a partner to discuss implementation ideas, before I start coding. This is interesting; I do a third thing that's the exact opposite of both of you. I generally know the architecture I want, so I just slowly spoon-feed it to GPT-4 and have it build each of the components with the right interfaces to fit together. Usually, building each component requires a few rounds of hand-holding it through various refactoring. Its first draft of code tends to be, for lack of a better description, totally lacking in any creativity or elegance --- generally bland, insipid, and mundane stuff. But it'll gladly take refactoring directions to get it into shape, so it's still very quick to get a whole bunch of components written up. Then I just glue everything together on my own. And the whole experience is still way better than writing a bunch of boring boilerplate code by hand.
DannyBee 3y ago
I'm happy to share transcripts if you email me. I'm not sure what you are feeding it. My scope is closer to a file at a time of fairly mostly self-contained python or C and asking it to clean it up or convert it to typescript. I can imagine lots of scenarios it doesn't work well. In mine, it does, and I have plenty of transcripts showing that :)

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maxwelljoslyn 3y ago

Seconded. I am also keenly interested in learning more. It would be a great boon on my current project to be able to let the AI refactor mountains of legacy code (while taking steps to ensure the results are trustworthy and equivalent, of course.)

maaanu 3y ago

Yes, I've observed the same phenomenon. The more detailed my prompts are, the more errors GPT tends to make. I use it as a partner to discuss implementation ideas, before I start coding. That works very well, because gpt and I usually find somethings, that I missed at a first glance. But coding with gpt or co-pilot is too disrupted for me.

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
> The more detailed my prompts are, the more errors GPT tends to make. I use it as a partner to discuss implementation ideas, before I start coding. This is interesting; I do a third thing that's the exact opposite of both of you. I generally know the architecture I want, so I just slowly spoon-feed it to GPT-4 and have it build each of the components with the right interfaces to fit together. Usually, building each component requires a few rounds of hand-holding it through various refactoring. Its first draft of code tends to be, for lack of a better description, totally lacking in any creativity or elegance --- generally bland, insipid, and mundane stuff. But it'll gladly take refactoring directions to get it into shape, so it's still very quick to get a whole bunch of components written up. Then I just glue everything together on my own. And the whole experience is still way better than writing a bunch of boring boilerplate code by hand.

DannyBee 3y ago

I'm happy to share transcripts if you email me. I'm not sure what you are feeding it. My scope is closer to a file at a time of fairly mostly self-contained python or C and asking it to clean it up or convert it to typescript. I can imagine lots of scenarios it doesn't work well. In mine, it does, and I have plenty of transcripts showing that :)