Programming

17528 readers

240 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

ChatGPT - is using it cheating? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

54 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Over the last year I've been learning Swift and starting to put together some iOS apps. I'd definitely class myself as a Swift beginner.

I'm currently building an app and today I used ChatGPT to help with a function I needed to write. I found myself wondering if somehow I was "cheating". In the past I would have used YouTube videos, online tutorials and Stack Overflow, and adapted what I found to work for my particular usage case.

Is using ChatGPT different? The fact that ChatGPT explains the code it writes and often the code still needs fettling to get it to work makes me think that it is a useful learning tool and that as long as I take the time to read the explanations given and ensure I understand what the code is doing then it's probably a good thing on balance.

I was just wondering what other people's thoughts are?

Also, as a side note, I found that chucking code I had written in to ChatGPT and asking it to comment every line was pretty successful and a. big time saver :D

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I wouldn't consider the bugs chatgpt's fault, per se. The same could happen by blindly copy/pasting from SO or a template Github project. If you are copy/pasting from anywhere, it's even more important that you have good automated tests with good coverage, and that you take extra time to understand what you pasted.

One of the things I do is generate high level tests first, and then the implementation code. This way I know it works, and I can spend extra time reviewing the test code first to make sure it has the correct goal(s).

Learning is another matter. Personally, ChatGPT has greatly accelerated my learning of libraries and other languages. I've also used it to help me grok a block of complex code, and to automatically comment and refactor complex code into something more understandable. But it can also be used as a crutch.