ChatGPT just makes me feel like I'm doing code review for junior developers who don't understand the task... wait...
this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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For the love of God, if you're a junior programmer you're overestimating your understanding if you keep relying on chatGPT thinking 'of course I'll spot the errors'. You will until you won't and you end up dropping the company database or deleting everything in root.
All ChatGPT is doing is guessing the next word. And it's trained on a bunch of bullshit coding blogs that litter the internet, half of which are now chatGPT written (without any validation of course).
If you can't take 10 - 30 minutes to search for, read, and comprehend information on stack overflow or docs then programming (or problem solving) just isn't for you. The junior end of this feel is really getting clogged with people who want to get rich quick without doing any of the legwork behind learning how to be good at this job, and ChatGPT is really exarcebating the problem.
If you can’t take 10 - 30 minutes to search for, read, and comprehend information on stack overflow or docs
A lot of the time this is just looking for syntax though; you know what you want to do, and it's simple, but it is gated behind busywork. This is to me the most useful part about ChatGPT, it knows all the syntax and will write it out for you and answer clarifying questions so you can remain in a mental state of thinking about the actual problem instead of digging through piles of junk for a bit of information.
Somehow you hit an unpopular opinion landmine with the greybeard devs.
For the greybeard devs: Try asking ChatGPT to write you some Arduino code to do a specific task. Even if you don't know how to write code for an Arduino, ChatGPT will get you 95% of the way there with the proper libraries and syntax.
No way in hell I'm digging through forums and code repos for hours to blink an led and send out a notification through a web hook when a sensor gets triggered if AI can do it for me in 30 seconds. AI obviously can't do everything for you if you've never coded anything before, but it can do a damn good job of translating your knowledge of one programming language into every other programming language available.
It's great for jumping into something you're very unfamiliar with. Unfortunately, if you often find yourself very unfamiliar with day to day tasks, you're probably incompetent. (Or maybe a butterfly who gets paid to learn new things every day.)
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Just a few days ago I read an article on the newest features of Kotlin 1.9. Zero of it was true.
Internet is littered with stuff like this.
If model is correct, you are correct. If model is not correct, you are working on false assumptions.
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The more you grow in experience the more you're going to realize that syntax and organization is the majority of programming work.
When you first start out, it feels like the hardest part is figuring out how to get from a to b on a conceptual level. Eventually that will become far easier.
You break the big problem down into discrete steps, then figure out the besy way to do each step. It takes little skill to say "the computer just needs to do this". The trick is knowing how to speak to the computer in a way that can make sense to the computer, to you, and to the others who will eventually have to work with your code.
You're doing the equivalent of a painter saying "I've done the hard part of envisioning it in my head! I'm just going to pay some guy on fiver to move the brush for me"
This is difficult to put into words, as it's also not about memorization of every language specific syntax pattern. But there's a difference between looking up documentation or at previous code for syntax, and trying to have chatGPT turn your psuedocode notes into working code.
The more you grow in experience the more you're going to realize that syntax and organization is the majority of programming work.
organization, absolutely - but syntax? c'mon...
I'm a pretty senior dev and have chat gpt open for quick searches. It's great for helping me figure out what to Google in the cases where I can't think of the name of a pattern or type I'm looking for. It also helps quite a bit with learning about obscure functions and keywords in SQL that I can do more research on
Hell, I use Copilot daily. Its auto complete is top-tier
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I've been programming for decades, I'm not actually a beginner. A mistake I made early on was thinking that everything I learn will be worth the time to learn it, and will always increase my overall skill level. But (particularly as relates to syntax) it's not and it doesn't; something I only use once or rarely, something that isn't closely connected with the rest of what I often do, I'll just forget it after a while. I greatly prefer being broadly capable of making things happen to having a finely honed specialization, so I run into that sort of thing a lot, there is an ocean of information out there and many very different things a programmer can be doing.
I think it is an important and valuable lesson to know when to get over yourself and take shortcuts. There are situations where you absolutely should never do that, but they are rare. There are many situations where not taking shortcuts is a huge mistake and will result in piles of abandoned code and not finishing what you set out to do. AI is an incredibly powerful source of shortcuts.
You’re doing the equivalent of a painter saying “I’ve done the hard part of envisioning it in my head! I’m just going to pay some guy on fiver to move the brush for me”
More like you've coded the functionality for a webapp, have a visual mockup, and pay some guy on fiver to write the CSS for you, because doing it yourself is an inefficient use of your time and you don't specialize in CSS.
As for the issue of a new programmer ending up with problems because they rely too much on AI and somehow fail to learn how to model the structure of programs in their head, that's probably real, but I can't imagine how that will go because all I had to go on when I was learning was google and IRC and it's totally different. Hope it works out for them.
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Never ask ChatGPT to write code that you plan to actually use, and never take it as a source of truth. I use it to put me on a possible right path when I'm totally lost and lack the vocabulary to accurately describe what I need. Sometimes I'll ask it for an example of how sometimes works so that I can learn it myself. It's an incredibly useful tool, but you're out of your damn mind if you're just regularly copying code it spits out. You need to error check everything it does, and if you don't know the syntax well enough to write it yourself, how the hell do you plan to reliably error check it?
You absolutely can ask it for code you plan to use as long as you treat chatgpt like a beginner dev. Give it a small, very simple, self contained task and test it thoroughly.
Also, you can write unit tests while being quite unfamiliar with the syntax. For example, you could write a unit test for a function which utilizes a switch statement, without using a switch statement to test it. There's a whole sect of "test driven development" where this kind of development would probably work pretty well.
I'll agree that if you can't test a piece of code, you have no business writing in the language in a professional capacity.
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ChatGPT is banned by my employer, because they don't want trade secrets being leaked, which IMO is fair enough. We work on ML stuff anyway.
Anyway, we have a junior engineer that has been caught using ChatGPT several times, whether it's IT flagging its use, seeing a tab open in their browser during a demo, or simply just seeing code they obviously didn't write in code I'm reviewing.
I recently tried to help them out on a project that uses React, and it is clear as day that this engineer cannot write code without ChatGPT. The library use is all over the place, they'll just "invent" certain API's, or they'll use things that were deprecated/don't work if you've even attempted to think about the problem. IMO, reliance on ChatGPT is much worse than how juniors used to be reliant on Stack Overflow to find answers to copy paste.
I’m surprised these people can pass a technical interview. I imagine the employer doesn’t test candidates for something like this to happen.
One of the dirty secrets at FAANG companies is that lots of people join from internships, and can get all the way to senior and above without ever needing to go through a standard, full technical loop. If you have a formal apprenticeship scheme, sometimes you'll join through a non-tech loop.
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The underlying problem is the same, it just became more accessible to copy code you don't understand (you don't even need to come up with a search query that leads you to some kind of answer, chatpgt will interpret your words and come up with something). Proper use of chatgpt can boost productivity, but people (both critics of chatgpt and people who don't actually know how to code) misuse it, look at it as a "magic solution box" instead of a tool that can assist development and lead you to solutions.
.....who wrote code without stack overflow
I've got no issues with people using stackoverflow or chatGPT as a reference. The problem has always been when anyone just skims what they found and just paste it in without understanding it. Without looking at the rest of the comments, further discussion, or looking at any other search results for further insight and context.
I think chatGPT makes this sort of "carelessness" (as opposed to carefulness) even easier to do, as it appears to be responding with an answer to your exact question and not just something the search algorithm thinks is related.
In days of yore, before Google or even Altavista, you could tell the quality of a team by how many O'Reilly books they had on the shelves.
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I find it to be suprisingly usless compared to classic aproach. But in my case it might be beacuse of the language i work with ( abap ).
It's not the language. ChatGPT is about as useful as a decent code manual. It won't actually solve any problems for you, but it can show you the general format for doing so.
Notepad++ is perfectly fine to code in. With the wealth of plugins it has, it's pretty similar to vscode in how you can trick it out with all sorts of things it can't do by default.
I'm a tolerant person, but come on, man. Between VSCode, JetBrains, (n)vim and emacs, and I can't think of a legitimate reason to use np++ for development over any of them.
It's super fast in comparison to full IDEs and is easier to use than most editors. I switch between vscode and notepad++ depending on what im doing.
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Notepad++ gang
I strongly advise not to do that. As others pointed out, it really is just predicting the next word. It is worth learning about how to problem solve and to recognize that the only way to become a better program is with practice. It's better to get programming advice from real people online and read the documentations for the functions and languages you are trying to use.
If the internet has succeeded in anything, it's that the illusion of competence is worth more than the thing itself. Until someone calls you out, that is.
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ChatGPT is next level Rubber Duck. Tell it to talk to you like Socrates.
I can code a feature faster than i can debug ChatGPTs attempt. so long as it's in JS
ChatGPT is better at bash than me though
The good thing about ChatGPT is that it gives you a starting point for languages you're not familiar / rusty with.
There was once a programmer that wrote his own code
Of course the first programmer did, but everyone who came after just copied her work and tweaked it a bit to suit their needs.
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I literally cannot comprehend coding with ChatGPT- How can I expect something to work if I don't understand it, and how can I understand it if I don't code and debug it myself? How can you expect to troubleshoot any issues afterwards if you don't understand the code? I wouldn't trust GPT for anything more complex than Hello World.
Just yesterday, I wrote a first version of a fairly complex method, then pasted it into GPT-4. It explained my code to me clearly, I was able to have a conversation with it about the code, and when I asked it to write a better version, that version ended up having a couple significant logical simplifications. (And a silly defect that I corrected it on.)
The damn thing hallucinates sometimes (especially with more obscure/deep topics) and occasionally makes stupid mistakes, so it keeps you on your toes a bit, but it is nevertheless a very valuable tool.
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You shouldn't use code that you don't understand. Chatgpt outputs quite readable and understandable code and makes sure to explain a lot of it and you can ask questions about it.
It can save quite a lot of effort, especially for tasks that are more tedious than hard. Even more if you have a general idea of what you want to do but you're not familiar with the specific tools and libraries that you want to use for the task.
It's also wrong a lot. Hence the requirement for understanding. It can be helpful to get through a stretch but it will fuck up before too long and relying on it entirely is a bad idea.
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If you're doing something extremely skillfully, chat gpt will make the dumbest suggestions ever...
Chatgpt is good for learning ideas and new things as an aggregate of what everyone thinks about it. But as a coding tool it cannot reason properly and has rubber stamp solutions for everything.
Well yes it's responses are based on what the average of the internet would say.
I'm surprised it doesn't constantly tell you to format windows and reinstall no matter what you ask
What about a programmer that doesn't use stack overflow.
Today we have chatbots. Yesterday we had search engines and stack overflow. Before that we had books. And before that? Well what do you know... software programming is a relatively novel field. It's almost as if nobody has perfected how it should be learned.
The most valuable knowledge comes from experience. I copied plenty of code around during my learning days as well, and I still do it today. The most important part however is trying to understand the code you're working with. If you can understand it, know when it fails, test it in the right way, etc., then sure, you could probably learn to code from chatbots. They provide the information, and you're at liberty to do what you want with it. If you just copy it and forget, you'll be a bad programmer. But it's not like you couldn't do that before either with the other sources that were available - there were plenty of bad programmers before we had these tools available too.
That said, there is a risk that these chatbots do not provide any useful context around the code that they produce. When you learned from a book or stack overflow, you were reading from a reasonably authoritative source that could explain the code that was produced. But the authority behind the code from chatbots is probably much weaker than what we have from stack overflow, which in turn was probably also weaker than what we have from books. Does it have an effect or learning? I have no clue. But I still think you can learn from chatbots if you use the output that they provide in the right way. (Disclaimer: I have never used one of them and have no experience with them.)
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