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People say AI can't write good code, but they're missing the point
People say AI can't write good code, but they're missing the point
You used to have to hunt down a few stack overflow posts, sprinkle in some trial-and-error wrestling with technical documentation, and finish it off with a YouTube video or two to get the information you needed to build a solution to a particular problem.
And that's the description of a "Career Programmer" right there -- nothing wrong with it. We made good money doing it.
But now ChatGPT does that all for you in a few seconds each time. It doesn't write code for you (It does, but that's not the main benefit), no:
It assembles solutions to problems in seconds that used to take hours.
That is automation.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 7thpower 2y agoYes. I read a study somewhere yesterday, probably on here, that ChatGPT was only right 50% of the time. That sounds bad, unless your experience is searching stack overflow or some tutorial that omits the most crucial steps, and your success rate is closer to 10%.
- johnwheeler 2y agoBingo! And competence is really important. There's something about the way LLMs work where they cater to your level of understanding. So the better you are at prompting, the better it is at answering. I mean, we all know that, but I don't think people look at the inverse: LLMs cater to your level of understanding. That is really the correct way to think about how they operate. The better you are, the better they are. Magic prompts and such are the incorrect way to interact with an LLM for best long-term results. You need to be competent.
- rossdavidh 2y agoSo, given that Microsoft is the company with the most direct access to ChatGPT (it can dictate who the CEO is, it runs on their cloud compute platform, etc.), we should see the proof of this improved productivity soon, when Microsoft starts releasing software improvements at an unprecedented rate, yes? No need to argue about whether or not LLM's can improve productivity; we have a giant canary in the coalmine (except in a positive sense). If ChatGPT really improves net programmer productivity, we will see Microsoft becoming the most productive software company. Given that they've had ChatGPT for a couple years now, we should be seeing the fruits of this soon. If, a year from now, we don't see any evidence of Microsoft's productivity increasing in any way that's noticeable from the outside, we'll have our answer, from empirical data.
- johnwheeler 2y agoWait, are you seriously putting to question whether ChatGPT increases programmer productivity?
- rossdavidh 2y agoNo need to question or debate; just pointing out that we are getting an empirical test of it as we speak. We'll have the empirical data in a year or less.
- verdverm 2y agoMSFT's other advantage is VS Code, the most widely used general purpose IDE