3 ms·
I think most people are still "holding them wrong", and it'll take an entire generation of people to really figure out what these things are and are not good fo
by jiggawatts 2y ago
I think most people are still "holding them wrong", and it'll take an entire generation of people to really figure out what these things are and are not good for.
I'll give two recent use-cases that may provide a hint of their ultimate utility:
1) I've been modernising 2010-era ASP.NET code written by former VB programmers that looooved to sprinkle try { ... } catch( Exception e ) { throw e; } throughout. I mean thousands upon thousands of instances of these pointless magical incantations that do nothing except screw up stack traces. They probably thought it was the equivalent of "ON ERROR RESUME NEXT", but... no, not really. Anyway, I asked ChatGPT in "Reasoning" mode to write a CLI tool utilising the Roslyn C# compiler SDK to help clean this up. It took about three prompts and less than an hour, and it spat out 300 lines of code that required less than 10 to be modified by me. It deleted something like 10K lines of garbage code from a code base for me. Because I used a proper compiler toolkit, there was no risk of hallucinations, so the change Just Worked.
2) I was recently troubleshooting some thread pool issues. I suspect that some long-running requests were overlapping in time, but Azure's KQL doesn't directly provide a timeline graphical view. I dumped out the data into JSON, gave ChatGPT a snippet, and told it to make me a visualiser using HTML and JS. I then simply pasted in the full JSON dump (~1 MB) and ta-da instant timeline overlap visualiser! It even supported scrolling and zooming. Neat.