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I'm not even sure most people on HN feel that way, although there's plenty of criticism here. Most of the time I use ChatGPT I become genuinely upset within a

I'm not even sure most people on HN feel that way, although there's plenty of criticism here. Most of the time I use ChatGPT I become genuinely upset within a few minutes because it's so brazenly awful and regularly ignores what I ask it. I see people on here promoting its ability to help them with writing code. I wonder if these are people that just don't know what good code looks like.

ta8645 2y ago
I recognize the hype for what it is, but I find the people calling for "sanity" are overrepresented everywhere; and it seems to me they discount the actual utility of AI way too much. In other words, I think the AI-skepticism is overhyped, just as much as AI itself. For my uses, I find AI to be a much better search/answer engine than Google ever was. It can produce answers with hyperlinks for further reading much better and more efficiently than any other option. I no longer have to read through a bunch of seemingly random Google search results, hoping that my specific question is addressed.
- lottin 2y ago
  I think it's a matter of personal preference. I much prefer going through a series of search results than reading anything a chatbot has to say about any topic.
Bumblonono 2y ago
Plenty of people understand that LLM is not AI. Nonethless, try looking more left and right. There are really good opensource solutions which can surfe the web for you like stormai, Or you can use anythingllm and give it all your local files. You can write your tips and tricks, start commands, upgrade procedures etc. in Markdown and reference it through your local LLM. I like it for coding specifically for languages or things i write seldomly (i'm not coding every day but did for 15 years). Nonetheless, googles internal code review tool is already suggesting things which are getting accepted by more than 50%. Thats a lot and will only get better. GitHub with Copilot will also just get better every day too. They probably struggled (as the whole industry) with actually getting used to having ML stuff in our ecosystem. Its still relativly new.
glenndebacker 2y ago
It helps me to code (or helped me with mathematical concepts that I find difficult to implement or would take me a lot of time) but then again I use it for generating mainly graphics related code in Blender or as part of a grasshopper script so the code doesn't that much as the correct output. That being said, I often come in a situation that its not the code that is bad but the solution. Where I need to tell the LLM that it's not logical to do it in a certain way leveraging on my own knowledge.
ben_w 2y ago
Mm. As it happens, I've just been using it this weekend to write code for me. Two things: (1) it's not business critical code, it's a side project that I want to get done but otherwise wouldn't have energy for. Especially not in this heatwave in a century old building that has no air-con. (2) my experiments are a weird mix of ChatGPT wildly messing things up and it managing to get basically everything done to an acceptable result (not quality of code, quality of output). Sometimes I have the same experience as you, that it's just aggravating in its non-comprehension, sometimes it's magical. I don't know if it can be magical more often if I was "better at prompting". But I do know that I also get aggravated (less often) by other humans not understanding me, and those are much harder to roll back to a previous point in the conversation, edit the prompt, and have them try again :P As for code quality… well, sure. Stuff I'm asking ChatGPT for is python and JavaScript, and I'm an iOS dev. I can't tell when it's doing something non-idiomatic, or using an obsolete library or archaic pattern in those languages.

ta8645 2y ago

I recognize the hype for what it is, but I find the people calling for "sanity" are overrepresented everywhere; and it seems to me they discount the actual utility of AI way too much. In other words, I think the AI-skepticism is overhyped, just as much as AI itself. For my uses, I find AI to be a much better search/answer engine than Google ever was. It can produce answers with hyperlinks for further reading much better and more efficiently than any other option. I no longer have to read through a bunch of seemingly random Google search results, hoping that my specific question is addressed.

lottin 2y ago
I think it's a matter of personal preference. I much prefer going through a series of search results than reading anything a chatbot has to say about any topic.

Bumblonono 2y ago

Plenty of people understand that LLM is not AI. Nonethless, try looking more left and right. There are really good opensource solutions which can surfe the web for you like stormai, Or you can use anythingllm and give it all your local files. You can write your tips and tricks, start commands, upgrade procedures etc. in Markdown and reference it through your local LLM. I like it for coding specifically for languages or things i write seldomly (i'm not coding every day but did for 15 years). Nonetheless, googles internal code review tool is already suggesting things which are getting accepted by more than 50%. Thats a lot and will only get better. GitHub with Copilot will also just get better every day too. They probably struggled (as the whole industry) with actually getting used to having ML stuff in our ecosystem. Its still relativly new.

glenndebacker 2y ago

It helps me to code (or helped me with mathematical concepts that I find difficult to implement or would take me a lot of time) but then again I use it for generating mainly graphics related code in Blender or as part of a grasshopper script so the code doesn't that much as the correct output. That being said, I often come in a situation that its not the code that is bad but the solution. Where I need to tell the LLM that it's not logical to do it in a certain way leveraging on my own knowledge.

ben_w 2y ago

Mm. As it happens, I've just been using it this weekend to write code for me. Two things: (1) it's not business critical code, it's a side project that I want to get done but otherwise wouldn't have energy for. Especially not in this heatwave in a century old building that has no air-con. (2) my experiments are a weird mix of ChatGPT wildly messing things up and it managing to get basically everything done to an acceptable result (not quality of code, quality of output). Sometimes I have the same experience as you, that it's just aggravating in its non-comprehension, sometimes it's magical. I don't know if it can be magical more often if I was "better at prompting". But I do know that I also get aggravated (less often) by other humans not understanding me, and those are much harder to roll back to a previous point in the conversation, edit the prompt, and have them try again :P As for code quality… well, sure. Stuff I'm asking ChatGPT for is python and JavaScript, and I'm an iOS dev. I can't tell when it's doing something non-idiomatic, or using an obsolete library or archaic pattern in those languages.