Just out of curiosity. I have no moral stance on it, if a tool works for you I’m definitely not judging anyone for using it. Do whatever you can to get your work done!

  • Platypus@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    43
    ·
    1 year ago

    I’ve been using it a little to automate really stupid simple programming tasks. I’ve found it’s really bad at producing feasible code for anything beyond the grasp of a first-year CS student, but there’s an awful lot of dumb code that needs to be written and it’s certainly easier than doing it by hand.

    As long as you’re very precise about what you want, you don’t expect too much, and you check its work, it’s a pretty useful tool.

    • jecxjo
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      11
      ·
      1 year ago

      I’ve found it useful for basically finding the example code for a 3rd party library. Basically a version of Stack Exchange that can be better or worse.

      • Lmaydev@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        9
        ·
        1 year ago

        I essentially use it as interactive docs. As long as what you’re learning existed before 2021 it’s great.

        • jecxjo
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          1 year ago

          Yeah sadly the times I’ve gotten screwed is when a major version change occurred in 2022. Got burned once doing that and now I know to check to see if we have upgraded past the version the code works before spending too much time working on it.

    • Kilamaos@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      10
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      I don’t know you, the language you use, nor the way you use chat gpt, but I’m a bit surprised at what you say. I’ve been using chatgpt on a nearly daily basis for months now and while it’s not perfect, if the task isn’t super complicated and if it’s described well, after a couple of back and forth I usually have what I need. It works, does what is expected, without being an horrendous way to code it.

      And gpt4 is even better

      • Platypus@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        1 year ago

        My job involves a lot of shimming code in between systems that are archaic, in-house, or very specific to my industry (usually some combination of the three), so the problems I’m usually solving don’t have much representation in gpt’s training data. Sometimes I get to do more rapid prototyping/sandbox kind of work, and it’s definitely much more effective there where I’m (a) using technologies that might pop up on stack overflow and (b) don’t have a set of arcane constraints the length of my arm to contend with.

        I’m absolutely certain that it’s going to be a core part of my workflow in the future, either when the tech improves or I switch jobs, but for right now the most value I get out of it is as effectively a SO search tool.

        • Kilamaos@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          1 year ago

          Got it. With context, it makes much more sense.

          I myself use some of the most widely used programming language ( php and react mostly ) so yhea, there’s plenty to be found with those

    • vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      I, like most peaple, find it easier to write code than to read it. That “check its work” step means more work actually, for me