22 ms·

How ChatGPT made me lazy

35 points by pdyc 3y ago

ramon156 3y ago
A bad painted blames his tools
- pdyc 3y ago
  whom does a good painter blame?
  - jdewerd 3y ago
    Evidently we don't need ChatGPT to make us lazy. ChatGPT, could you correct the grammar in these posts? Sure, here are the corrected versions of the posts: ramon156 2 minutes ago [–] A bad painter blames his tools. pdyc 0 minutes ago | parent [–] Whom does a good painter blame?
    - rideontime 3y ago
      The internet is a global communications platform. You may want to adjust your expectations re: immaculate English usage.
      - jdewerd 3y ago
        My expectations are normally on the floor, but when accusations of laziness start to fly I think it's 100% fair to note the wide discrepancy between the accusations on one hand and the effort on the other.
  - notpachet 3y ago
    Themselves.
  - mariocesar 3y ago
    A good painter does not blame but reflects. That could be the whole sentence
Bud 3y ago
[dead]
sho_hn 3y ago
I'm an experienced programmer currently mentoring an friend who wants to branch out into software development. We agreed the following experiment would be interesting to both of us: We're sharing a ChatGPT Plus subscription, and I'm allowed to read the conversations he has with the model related to his learning projects. He's using it for general tech questions, but also for code analysis and code generation, bug-finding and so on. It's been a mixed bag. On some level, his progress is faster and his productivity is higher than it would have been without the AI assistance. OTOH, the cost to this progress not having been hard-earned is pretty high, too: He takes a lot of AI-generated boilerplate for granted now without understanding it or the concepts behind it, so when the AI gets it wrong or forgets it, he is unable to notice what's missing. He also gets stumped/stuck often where he shouldn't - technically he's aware of all the constituent parts of the solution he needs, but he can't integrate the knowledge. Often he doesn't even try and just heads to ChatGPT, which can't help him, often because he doesn't know how to phrase the question correctly. There's a lot of value to having done the legwork and having fought for every line of code and little bit of a solution that gets skipped over here in this style of the skill acquisition. Edit: A few more details in later comment.
- boredemployee 3y ago
  That's really interesting. You guys should write an article about it covering both perspectives. Recently my ex-employer said he fired a junior dev because he was relying too much on paid ChatGPT, without understanding the concepts.
- pdyc 3y ago
  >> He takes a lot of AI-generated boilerplate for granted now without understanding it or the concepts behind it i have seen this too in junior programmers. It is indeed bad but than i think of myself without internet and in some ways i too become handicapped like them unable to make meaningful progress without access to documentation so its a mixed bag. Good programmers will learn to identify gaps and filling them so that they can better utilize the tools others would be left behind. For senior programmers its an absolute productivity boost.
  - 3y ago
rootusrootus 3y ago
Similar to what SO did, but even more completely. I don't even bother with SO anymore.
- tester457 3y ago
  I think SO is still necessary for nuanced discussion. Gpt4 still lacks domain experience. It's just another tool in the toolbelt. I use it more than the other tools but each tool is still invaluable.
- yura 3y ago
  I've learned so many things on SO though. For example, some amazing answers there made me realize the power of sed and awk, and motivated me to learn it. Ironically, I think the greatest quality of SO is exactly what most people complain about: that sometimes when you ask how to do X, they will tell you that X is a bad idea and you should probably do Y. I've learned many more efficient ways to do what I was trying to do, good security practices, and so on, because of this culture. Whereas if you ask ChatGPT how to do X, it'll happily tell you how to do X, even if X is a bad idea. (As a bonus, it might make something up if X is impossible to do.) Besides, ChatGPT's answers are mediocre, by the definition of the word: dead average. You'll never get some guru-level insight from ChatGPT that you would sometimes get from a particularly exceptional answer in SO. Note: I don't mean to say that SO is perfect, there's plenty of bad answers and it has other problems too. I just think SO does more good than harm to novices who want to become better at the trade, whereas ChatGPT is downright harmful for learning.
mariocesar 3y ago
"How StackOverflow made me lazy" "How Google made me lazy" "How Internet made me lazy" ... And so on
- lionkor 3y ago
  Maybe its intentional, but you're actually making the opposite point of what you think, in my view? All of the best programmers I know do not copy code, they try to understand first, and then apply what they learned. In this way, they use ChatGPT, SO, google, etc. the same amount for copy pasting code: Pretty much not at all.
  - mariocesar 3y ago
    Good engineers reflect and avoid blaming. Generalizations and tribal thinking are bad habits. Stackoverflow, the internet, and a keyboard are tools to be mastered. Good engineers prefer to think for themselves no matter the tool they are using.
    - croes 3y ago
      But Stackoverflow and especially ChatGPT enable bad engineers to pose as good ones.
      - mariocesar 3y ago
        So, the issue is more about the Social appearance of a successful engineer, not what good engineers are and how they behave.
        croes 3y ago
        The issue is that good engineers are harder to find because of bad engineers with better tools. ChatGPT is like doping in sports.
    - elwell 3y ago
      > Generalizations and tribal thinking are bad habits. If generalizations are bad, why do you immediately make one about tribal thinking (not to mention 'generalizations' itself)? Tribal thinking isn't always bad; it's the same glue that holds families together.
toss1 3y ago
Sounds a bit like the complaints about digital calculators making people lazy instead of doing the calculations on paper or a slide-rule?
- croes 3y ago
  Strangely enough, people are lazy. They fall for stupid claims which could be easily debunked with their smartphone. Even simple calculations aren't done. Many people forgot how to chew and only swallow.
- jprete 3y ago
  If you use a calculator without knowing what addition or multiplication mean, then that's also a serious problem.
- mariocesar 3y ago
  It sounds exactly like that. You are right. Like teachers complaining about students using tables or sliding rules. Or Socrates complaining writing makes people lazy to remember facts.
deadbabe 3y ago
Laziness is something that should be earned. When you’re starting out, you should be doing things the hard way on purpose. Learn things the hard way, don’t look at “Learn X in Y days” type tutorials. Use simple tools. Write code by hand.
LeonardoSousa 3y ago
I have the same kind of thoughts often, but then I think to myself: is it a bad thing being lazier if I get more things done? I don't think so. Overall it's been net positive and that's what matters for me at the end of the day
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
PreInternet01 3y ago
ChatGPT is an excellent sparring partner, for new, experienced and senior/ninja-elite developers alike. It does not, however, provide any solutions all by itself: 1. A significant amount of code it suggests uses external APIs that, while it would be nice if they existed, are purely imaginary. 2. Even when suggesting sensible code using existing APIs, it will happily provide coding snippets that have nothing in common, style-wise, with the code base you asked questions about, even if you provided sufficient context. 3. Some code will be, even if you push back, wholesale lifted from sources whose license you simply can't comply with. 4. Even the most basic coding questions, like "give me a C# function to fold SMTP headers according to the RFC" are flat-out wrong, or, best-case, woefully inefficient. So, whenever I use ChatGPT, it's entirely to see if there's a perspective that I missed. 80% of the cases, it's just babbling nonsense, and I happily disregard those results. The remaining 20% is quite valuable, though, even if separating the wheat from the chaff definitely involves my human judgement...
sibeliuss 3y ago
It is impossible to explain just how much ChatGPT has given me confidence to branch out into unknown langs in our company! It has made me fairly lazy in terms of the language I know, and I automate just as much as I can, but it really (really) shines around things I absolutely have no idea about, and has provided so much value.
- kkukshtel 3y ago
  I think a lot about Simon Wilson saying (somewhere...) about how one of the major things AI unlocks is the ability "to be more ambitious with side projects". I can echo this 100%. Being able to go from 0 to _something_ pretty easily even on a wild hair for an idea is so empowering, and often the hurdle that feels most difficult to jump. Even if you don't continue, learning about some domain with a mostly-working example is incredibly powerful.
renewiltord 3y ago
I mean, sure. Sometimes I just paste a timestamp in and ask it to turn it into an epoch time for me. Now that's lazy.
islewis 3y ago
I don't think "lazy" is the word I would use, but I can see how some would see it like that. In my mind, GPT (and LLM's) are just the next layer of abstractions on top of a already massive stack of technical abstractions. For a SWE, this stack of abstractions crosses so many levels for a simple "hello world" to work: 1. Software (my code) 2. OS (Linux, kernels, etc) 3. Hardware (3090, 5090x, etc) 4. Electrical (Where is my energy coming from? how is it produced?) Each of these levels could be broken into another 10 abstractions: On the software level, some people may understand how their compiler is working, but could they program in binary? What about understanding how their program interacts with memory? What about the kernel of where their software is deployed in the cloud? Do they know how their software is deployed in the cloud? Could they build the production server rack that their container is deployed on? Obviously this gets a bit ridiculous the further down you go- it's impossible to have knowledge about every part of what makes your code work. I think that when people use terms like "lazy" or say that knowledge is being lost with abstractions like GPT, they ignore the massive list of abstractions that allow them to be productive. I'd guess my thesis is that newer/GPT-aided engineers don't necessarily have less understanding, but their knowledge might just be shifted by one level up on the abstraction stack.
oofnik 3y ago
I had a similar experience just today when trying to debug a script that serves as a connector between AWS Athena and our internal log querying platform. I got fed up with trying to understand a bunch of arcane logic and asked ChatGPT to write me a new one. After a couple of back-and-forth rounds of copying and pasting error messages and sample data, I got the ChatGPT script working as a drop-in replacement. The new script is more readable, the logic is simpler, it took me less time to complete than either debugging the old script or writing a new one from scratch, and it was an overall more enjoyable experience. There is little doubt in my mind that in the not so distant future we will gawk at the thought that humans used to write production code by hand. Sure, the artisans and the enthusiasts among us will still be around to keep the flame, but day coding will be a mostly automated endeavor.
coold 3y ago
Always been
j7ake 3y ago
I predict future problems that are not easily “solved” or at least aided by chatgpt will have too high of an “activation barrier” to tackle relative to other problems that can be helped by chatgpt The next generation of thinkers will be shallow and won’t be able to or won’t want to think hard about problems by themselves.

35 points by pdyc 3y ago

ramon156 3y ago

A bad painted blames his tools

pdyc 3y ago
whom does a good painter blame?
- jdewerd 3y ago
  Evidently we don't need ChatGPT to make us lazy. ChatGPT, could you correct the grammar in these posts? Sure, here are the corrected versions of the posts: ramon156 2 minutes ago [–] A bad painter blames his tools. pdyc 0 minutes ago | parent [–] Whom does a good painter blame?
  - rideontime 3y ago
    The internet is a global communications platform. You may want to adjust your expectations re: immaculate English usage.
    - jdewerd 3y ago
      My expectations are normally on the floor, but when accusations of laziness start to fly I think it's 100% fair to note the wide discrepancy between the accusations on one hand and the effort on the other.
- notpachet 3y ago
  Themselves.
- mariocesar 3y ago
  A good painter does not blame but reflects. That could be the whole sentence

Bud 3y ago

[dead]

sho_hn 3y ago

I'm an experienced programmer currently mentoring an friend who wants to branch out into software development. We agreed the following experiment would be interesting to both of us: We're sharing a ChatGPT Plus subscription, and I'm allowed to read the conversations he has with the model related to his learning projects. He's using it for general tech questions, but also for code analysis and code generation, bug-finding and so on. It's been a mixed bag. On some level, his progress is faster and his productivity is higher than it would have been without the AI assistance. OTOH, the cost to this progress not having been hard-earned is pretty high, too: He takes a lot of AI-generated boilerplate for granted now without understanding it or the concepts behind it, so when the AI gets it wrong or forgets it, he is unable to notice what's missing. He also gets stumped/stuck often where he shouldn't - technically he's aware of all the constituent parts of the solution he needs, but he can't integrate the knowledge. Often he doesn't even try and just heads to ChatGPT, which can't help him, often because he doesn't know how to phrase the question correctly. There's a lot of value to having done the legwork and having fought for every line of code and little bit of a solution that gets skipped over here in this style of the skill acquisition. Edit: A few more details in later comment.

boredemployee 3y ago
That's really interesting. You guys should write an article about it covering both perspectives. Recently my ex-employer said he fired a junior dev because he was relying too much on paid ChatGPT, without understanding the concepts.
pdyc 3y ago
>> He takes a lot of AI-generated boilerplate for granted now without understanding it or the concepts behind it i have seen this too in junior programmers. It is indeed bad but than i think of myself without internet and in some ways i too become handicapped like them unable to make meaningful progress without access to documentation so its a mixed bag. Good programmers will learn to identify gaps and filling them so that they can better utilize the tools others would be left behind. For senior programmers its an absolute productivity boost.
- 3y ago

rootusrootus 3y ago

Similar to what SO did, but even more completely. I don't even bother with SO anymore.

tester457 3y ago
I think SO is still necessary for nuanced discussion. Gpt4 still lacks domain experience. It's just another tool in the toolbelt. I use it more than the other tools but each tool is still invaluable.
yura 3y ago
I've learned so many things on SO though. For example, some amazing answers there made me realize the power of sed and awk, and motivated me to learn it. Ironically, I think the greatest quality of SO is exactly what most people complain about: that sometimes when you ask how to do X, they will tell you that X is a bad idea and you should probably do Y. I've learned many more efficient ways to do what I was trying to do, good security practices, and so on, because of this culture. Whereas if you ask ChatGPT how to do X, it'll happily tell you how to do X, even if X is a bad idea. (As a bonus, it might make something up if X is impossible to do.) Besides, ChatGPT's answers are mediocre, by the definition of the word: dead average. You'll never get some guru-level insight from ChatGPT that you would sometimes get from a particularly exceptional answer in SO. Note: I don't mean to say that SO is perfect, there's plenty of bad answers and it has other problems too. I just think SO does more good than harm to novices who want to become better at the trade, whereas ChatGPT is downright harmful for learning.

mariocesar 3y ago

"How StackOverflow made me lazy" "How Google made me lazy" "How Internet made me lazy" ... And so on

lionkor 3y ago
Maybe its intentional, but you're actually making the opposite point of what you think, in my view? All of the best programmers I know do not copy code, they try to understand first, and then apply what they learned. In this way, they use ChatGPT, SO, google, etc. the same amount for copy pasting code: Pretty much not at all.
- mariocesar 3y ago
  Good engineers reflect and avoid blaming. Generalizations and tribal thinking are bad habits. Stackoverflow, the internet, and a keyboard are tools to be mastered. Good engineers prefer to think for themselves no matter the tool they are using.
  - croes 3y ago
    But Stackoverflow and especially ChatGPT enable bad engineers to pose as good ones.
    - mariocesar 3y ago
      So, the issue is more about the Social appearance of a successful engineer, not what good engineers are and how they behave.
      - croes 3y ago
        The issue is that good engineers are harder to find because of bad engineers with better tools. ChatGPT is like doping in sports.
  - elwell 3y ago
    > Generalizations and tribal thinking are bad habits. If generalizations are bad, why do you immediately make one about tribal thinking (not to mention 'generalizations' itself)? Tribal thinking isn't always bad; it's the same glue that holds families together.

toss1 3y ago

Sounds a bit like the complaints about digital calculators making people lazy instead of doing the calculations on paper or a slide-rule?

croes 3y ago
Strangely enough, people are lazy. They fall for stupid claims which could be easily debunked with their smartphone. Even simple calculations aren't done. Many people forgot how to chew and only swallow.
jprete 3y ago
If you use a calculator without knowing what addition or multiplication mean, then that's also a serious problem.
mariocesar 3y ago
It sounds exactly like that. You are right. Like teachers complaining about students using tables or sliding rules. Or Socrates complaining writing makes people lazy to remember facts.

deadbabe 3y ago

Laziness is something that should be earned. When you’re starting out, you should be doing things the hard way on purpose. Learn things the hard way, don’t look at “Learn X in Y days” type tutorials. Use simple tools. Write code by hand.

LeonardoSousa 3y ago

I have the same kind of thoughts often, but then I think to myself: is it a bad thing being lazier if I get more things done? I don't think so. Overall it's been net positive and that's what matters for me at the end of the day

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

PreInternet01 3y ago

ChatGPT is an excellent sparring partner, for new, experienced and senior/ninja-elite developers alike. It does not, however, provide any solutions all by itself: 1. A significant amount of code it suggests uses external APIs that, while it would be nice if they existed, are purely imaginary. 2. Even when suggesting sensible code using existing APIs, it will happily provide coding snippets that have nothing in common, style-wise, with the code base you asked questions about, even if you provided sufficient context. 3. Some code will be, even if you push back, wholesale lifted from sources whose license you simply can't comply with. 4. Even the most basic coding questions, like "give me a C# function to fold SMTP headers according to the RFC" are flat-out wrong, or, best-case, woefully inefficient. So, whenever I use ChatGPT, it's entirely to see if there's a perspective that I missed. 80% of the cases, it's just babbling nonsense, and I happily disregard those results. The remaining 20% is quite valuable, though, even if separating the wheat from the chaff definitely involves my human judgement...

sibeliuss 3y ago

It is impossible to explain just how much ChatGPT has given me confidence to branch out into unknown langs in our company! It has made me fairly lazy in terms of the language I know, and I automate just as much as I can, but it really (really) shines around things I absolutely have no idea about, and has provided so much value.

kkukshtel 3y ago
I think a lot about Simon Wilson saying (somewhere...) about how one of the major things AI unlocks is the ability "to be more ambitious with side projects". I can echo this 100%. Being able to go from 0 to _something_ pretty easily even on a wild hair for an idea is so empowering, and often the hurdle that feels most difficult to jump. Even if you don't continue, learning about some domain with a mostly-working example is incredibly powerful.

renewiltord 3y ago

I mean, sure. Sometimes I just paste a timestamp in and ask it to turn it into an epoch time for me. Now that's lazy.

islewis 3y ago

I don't think "lazy" is the word I would use, but I can see how some would see it like that. In my mind, GPT (and LLM's) are just the next layer of abstractions on top of a already massive stack of technical abstractions. For a SWE, this stack of abstractions crosses so many levels for a simple "hello world" to work: 1. Software (my code) 2. OS (Linux, kernels, etc) 3. Hardware (3090, 5090x, etc) 4. Electrical (Where is my energy coming from? how is it produced?) Each of these levels could be broken into another 10 abstractions: On the software level, some people may understand how their compiler is working, but could they program in binary? What about understanding how their program interacts with memory? What about the kernel of where their software is deployed in the cloud? Do they know how their software is deployed in the cloud? Could they build the production server rack that their container is deployed on? Obviously this gets a bit ridiculous the further down you go- it's impossible to have knowledge about every part of what makes your code work. I think that when people use terms like "lazy" or say that knowledge is being lost with abstractions like GPT, they ignore the massive list of abstractions that allow them to be productive. I'd guess my thesis is that newer/GPT-aided engineers don't necessarily have less understanding, but their knowledge might just be shifted by one level up on the abstraction stack.

oofnik 3y ago

I had a similar experience just today when trying to debug a script that serves as a connector between AWS Athena and our internal log querying platform. I got fed up with trying to understand a bunch of arcane logic and asked ChatGPT to write me a new one. After a couple of back-and-forth rounds of copying and pasting error messages and sample data, I got the ChatGPT script working as a drop-in replacement. The new script is more readable, the logic is simpler, it took me less time to complete than either debugging the old script or writing a new one from scratch, and it was an overall more enjoyable experience. There is little doubt in my mind that in the not so distant future we will gawk at the thought that humans used to write production code by hand. Sure, the artisans and the enthusiasts among us will still be around to keep the flame, but day coding will be a mostly automated endeavor.

coold 3y ago

Always been

j7ake 3y ago

I predict future problems that are not easily “solved” or at least aided by chatgpt will have too high of an “activation barrier” to tackle relative to other problems that can be helped by chatgpt The next generation of thinkers will be shallow and won’t be able to or won’t want to think hard about problems by themselves.