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I've stopped trying to use GPTs for complex tasks like what you describe, but I find them to be invaluable for getting a lot of grunt work done on my hobby proj

I've stopped trying to use GPTs for complex tasks like what you describe, but I find them to be invaluable for getting a lot of grunt work done on my hobby projects. As a concrete example: GitHub Copilot has been absolutely life-changing for working on hobby programming language projects. Building a parser by hand consists of writing many small, repetitive functions that use a tiny library of helper functions to recursively process tokens. A lot of people end up leaning on parser generators, but I've never found one that isn't both bloated and bad at error handling. This is where GitHub Copilot comes in—I write the grammar out in a markdown file that I keep open, build the AST data structure, then write the first few rules to give Copilot a bit of context on how I want to use the helper functions I built. From there I can just name functions and run Copilot and it fills in the rest of the parser. This is just one example of the kind of task that I find GPTs to be very good at—tasks that necessarily have a lot of repetition but don't have a lot of opportunities for abstraction. Another one that is perhaps more common is unit testing—after giving Copilot one example to go off of, it can generate subsequent unit tests just from the name of the test. Is it essential? No. But it sure saves a lot of typing, and is actually less likely than I am to make a silly mistake in these repetitive cases.

gs17 3y ago
Agreed, GitHub Copilot is fantastic if you give it something to work off of and outsource repetitive tasks to it. You still need to babysit it a little bit (it made a very subtle bug once that took a while to figure out), but it does a great job of generating code based on the other things you've been doing. It's a great little assistant to make coding less tedious.
- brianwawok 3y ago
  On the other hand, if you are writing repetitive code - are you missing an easy abstraction? Or if not, some easy code gen? If I find myself starting to write repetitive code It usually means I did something wrong.
  - skp1995 3y ago
    This has more to do with the fact that copilot by nature is additive and not editing your code. There was a recent report about how code quality is dropping in codebases because of the repetitive code being introduced by copilot. The next evolution as you are saying would be to detect if its a repetitive code and modularise it or refactor it.
    - thedougd 3y ago
      You can do this today with the VS Code extension. There’s a context menu for copilot to do things like “explain this code”. I asked it to make my current class more DRY and it refactored validation and parsing for a dozen or so arguments. It had one minor misunderstanding of my intent which I fixed by hand.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    This is why I specifically identified that there there are cases where there is no reasonable abstraction. DRY has become so much of a mantra in the industry that it's taken for granted that any repetition must be unnecessary, but there are times where that's just wrong. The first example I gave is parsers—even after you've factored out as many helper functions as you can, you'll eventually hit a floor where you have to use those helper functions and piece the results together. That floor is necessarily repetitive—you end up with a bunch of 5 to 10 line functions calling the abstractions and feeding the results together. Unit tests is another example: I find that when people get too DRY in unit tests it just ends up obfuscating what the test is testing and makes changing the program later harder. Same as with parsing, there is a floor for how much abstraction is reasonable and once you have hit that floor you still have to go through the rote repetition of stringing functions together and asserting things about the results. With a parser you actually have to do this, but with unit tests people will as often as not give up on the tedium and just not cover all the edge cases. Copilot enables developers to stop writing the repetitive code and spend their unit testing time thinking of edge cases.
  - gs17 3y ago
    Copilot is the easy code gen in this case. It's even surprisingly good at Rust macros.

gs17 3y ago

Agreed, GitHub Copilot is fantastic if you give it something to work off of and outsource repetitive tasks to it. You still need to babysit it a little bit (it made a very subtle bug once that took a while to figure out), but it does a great job of generating code based on the other things you've been doing. It's a great little assistant to make coding less tedious.

brianwawok 3y ago
On the other hand, if you are writing repetitive code - are you missing an easy abstraction? Or if not, some easy code gen? If I find myself starting to write repetitive code It usually means I did something wrong.
- skp1995 3y ago
  This has more to do with the fact that copilot by nature is additive and not editing your code. There was a recent report about how code quality is dropping in codebases because of the repetitive code being introduced by copilot. The next evolution as you are saying would be to detect if its a repetitive code and modularise it or refactor it.
  - thedougd 3y ago
    You can do this today with the VS Code extension. There’s a context menu for copilot to do things like “explain this code”. I asked it to make my current class more DRY and it refactored validation and parsing for a dozen or so arguments. It had one minor misunderstanding of my intent which I fixed by hand.
- lolinder 3y ago
  This is why I specifically identified that there there are cases where there is no reasonable abstraction. DRY has become so much of a mantra in the industry that it's taken for granted that any repetition must be unnecessary, but there are times where that's just wrong. The first example I gave is parsers—even after you've factored out as many helper functions as you can, you'll eventually hit a floor where you have to use those helper functions and piece the results together. That floor is necessarily repetitive—you end up with a bunch of 5 to 10 line functions calling the abstractions and feeding the results together. Unit tests is another example: I find that when people get too DRY in unit tests it just ends up obfuscating what the test is testing and makes changing the program later harder. Same as with parsing, there is a floor for how much abstraction is reasonable and once you have hit that floor you still have to go through the rote repetition of stringing functions together and asserting things about the results. With a parser you actually have to do this, but with unit tests people will as often as not give up on the tedium and just not cover all the edge cases. Copilot enables developers to stop writing the repetitive code and spend their unit testing time thinking of edge cases.
- gs17 3y ago
  Copilot is the easy code gen in this case. It's even surprisingly good at Rust macros.