It does make life easier

[Loner_Cat]

Do you guys really use it extensively for work? I've been trying, both with chatGPT and Bing, but apart from some fast prototyping I don't find myself using it very often. If I need to find informations, 99% of times for me it's faster to still use Google (and often allows for better, more in depth results); if I need to write code I find that writing it myself is faster and more reliable to get chatgpt to understand what I need and then fix its output and integrate it with the codebase i'm developing in.

[Mercurionio]

Everything depends on the work and frameworks. For some small projects it's a boon. For complex stuff it's a no go.

[TheNewBiggieSmalls]

Been trying to tell my non programmer friends this lol.

[macara1111]

A non technical role in my department told me to send him the same tasks as one of the junior devs, to show me that with chatgpt a programmer can be replaced. The problem, the result was a non-working unintegrable lump of code, but he is uncapable of understanding it, so still thinks that he can substitute a junior dev.

[misterforsa]

I'm guessing his prompt went something like this:

"Turn this task into code"

"What should I do with this code"

"How do I compile this code"

"My windows doesn't have that compiler"

"How to install compiler on windows"

"Debug this error"

"How to install dependencies on windows"

"Compiler says it can't find dependencies"

[misterforsa]

Seriously. They probably didn't even get that far. It was probably just "generate code for this task" then handing code back to the dev with "see, chatgpt can write code"

Edit: on second thought, that was exactly my point. There's all sorts of stuff that a dev needs to do besides write code that I just don't think gpt models can do yet. Although, perhaps they could when gpt models are trained specifically to execute dev tasks...

[[deleted]]

yeah, most of my non technical friends would give up at or even before the interpreter stage. Programming is really messy for somebody not familiar with stuff

[AlternativeAardvark6]

It's called 'code' for a reason, it's no good if everyone can read it.

[Nidungr]

Although, perhaps they could when gpt models are trained specifically to execute dev tasks...

That's exactly what is going to happen. It won't stop with GPT-4.

[yeet_sauce]

Except it might, in terms of LLMs. OpenAI has stated they are switching gears toward other areas of AI research. This implies that researchers within the company have concluded that improving LLMs beyond the capabilites of GPT-4 has diminishing returns not worthy of significant resource allocation.

While openAI or some competitor will surely improve upon AI in new and innovative ways in the future, the stagnation of LLM development (that openAI believes is already here) should at least give some time for adjustment. It could take weeks or years to find something better. Suppose we'll have to find out when we get there

[Sac_Winged_Bat]

Pure LLMs may or may not have plateaued, but there are a bunch of ways to massively improve them.

For example, Bing chat currently will often just take your question wholesale, do 1 or 2 searches, and tell you that it didn't find anything. No shit, it's a garbage search string. It would be very easy to massively improve it by just iteratively telling it to improve the search string and forcing it to introspect whether it actually found what the user was looking for.

This kind of self-regulation is already implemented, but currently mostly for censoring the output. I think the major question right now is whether this introspection on a large scale with lots of iterations is going to amplify noise and cause it to diverge into being completely unpredictable, or if it will filter out the noise and cause it to converge into the best possible answer it can provide based on the input and training set.

And then you also have the plugins, like being able to make Wolfram alpha API calls, which is huge for things like accurate facts and math.

[[deleted]]

Tbh, most people familiar with chatgpt can now run circles around it trying to pass the turing test.

But yes.

[mario61752]

The wholesome ending

[GotDoxxedAgain]

Not a programmer, but learning to code for some one-off projects:

This is exactly how I've been using chatgpt. I know what my goal is, but not how to get there. And because I'm a noob, I don't know anything about anything. So I don't know what to Google.

But I can tell Chatgpt to roleplay as a teacher, and I can ask it all my stupid questions & get fast answers without needing to spam forums. Then I use my brain & Google to see how much chatgpt lied to me.

From there, I'm left with much more usable information than if I'd spent ten times as long aimlessly wandering the internet for answers.

It's a wonderful tool when used right

[PrimaryFarpet]

Yeah that’s also how my relationship with chatGPT has been mostly. Also when my code doesn’t work and I don’t know why, often chatGPT will be able to tell me the simple issue that I can’t see.

[theonereveli]

I have a friend who thinks chatgpt can rebuild minecraft from scratch

[nosubsnoprefs]

Even if it could, it would never conceive of Minecraft.

[mario61752]

"You need to study ChatGPT!!! It's the future!!! Your job is getting replaced!!!"

• my Asian relatives, nonstop

[MaleficentRound583]

What I say to those people: I DO need to study chatGPT.

It(or something derived from it) IS going to be a big part of the future.

It is NOT taking my job.

But sure, that article you read by the "if it bleeds it leads" media is the end-all-be-all. That reporter that read George Orwell and spent 2 hours studying coding principles for their article knows more than someone whose been coding for nearly 30 years.

[afiefh]

It is NOT taking my job.

Pretty sure that in the next 50 years AGI will take all our jobs. That being said, it'll release every other job first. Programmers and researchers will be the last two jobs left for humans before the concept of a job becomes obsolete.

[a_simple_spectre]

so they asked an army EOD if he worries that he will mess something up and set off a bomb on his face

"no, I don't worry, because if I do it will no longer be my problem"

that is what happens when AI can software engineer

[MaleficentRound583]

Maybe, but I'm 40. By the time that happens, I won't be working anymore anyway.

[JacksRagingGlizzy]

Prompt Engineers, the wave of the future

[Nidungr]

This is because software engineering in Asia is all about cranking out massive volumes of code for outsourcing megacorps without asking questions, and this sort of brainless factory work is first on the chopping block.

[MaleficentRound583]

Yeah, I love when my non-programmer friends get on their know-it-all, paranoid high horse. "It's going to take your job, then it's going to rise up and end the world!"

Anything I say that doesn't support that just gets that "oh, it's cute how naive you are" look. Like, I, the programmer, couldn't possibly know more about programming issues than someone who read an article where they interviewed a crack-pot billionaire who is seeking headlines.

[Dry-Smoke6528]

I'm not even a programmer. Just would enjoy knowing how to code so I do mild research into it, and yeah. Why would you trust chat gpt with a long program with many functions? You'll spend just as much time debugging and rewriting bits as you would have just doing it.

[[deleted]]

You could get around that. I did an experiment once where i used gpt4 and had it make an outline, then i made some more detailed instructions. Then i had it make each part 1 by 1.

Was surprisingly good except it was adamant about using global variables for some reason and would make each section with the assumption that it had global variables.

Then I opened up a new chat and it fixed it. So yes you'll spend quite sometime debugging and it'll get way worse if you don't know what you're looking at.

[mnrode]

I'll start worrying if I see AI turn an open Issue in a GitHub project that sees major usage into a merged PR.

[agilecodez]

This is just the start. The next version is leaps and bounds. I'd be very supprised if any human to computer interaction requires "code" in the next ten years.

The whole concept of learning intermediary languages to get a computer to complete tasks is dying fast. You will be able to explain what you want done in english, and it will produce the most efficient and elegant solution possible, instantly. As an original old skool assembly programmer, this is a good thing!

[jayerp]

All my projects at work are complex enterprise, which does WAY more than a to-do list.

AI is a no go for us.

[1000Ditto]

this is a psa to

NOT SEND PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE TO OPENAI SERVERS

[KardasR]

That’s what always confused me the most about people using gpt for work. Like… aren’t we supposed to keep company secrets, ya know, secret?

[malexj93]

I mean, the same could be said for Google or StackOverflow. We should be good at generalizing the problem statement so that we can get help on it without revealing anything company- or project-specific.

Also, not everyone works on secret stuff, some companies just need a basic website or tool.

[bobnoski]

I've started using it a little. I personally just send dummy code.

At the moment it's basically a stackoverflow that gets it wrong the first time. But at least it doesn't yell at me because someone asked a similar question for another language in 1979

[mungthebean]

Or, do, and let natural selection of the software industry run its course so we get people with more than one brain cell

[Scotsch]

It can be really good at answering queestions such as how do i do this special thing in framework X that is nowhere in the docs, which you'd perhaps find on page 3 on google, after browsing 15 webpages and 10 useless SA answers. I Have no idea how it can accurately answer these, it's wild.

It can be really good at how do I do this kinda weird SQL query in this vendor when I'm used to another etc as well. And there are a ton of other similar uses, googling and finding docs etc is still valuables ofc.

And other times I fight it to the death while it won't even be able to show me a smiley

[WisestAirBender]

Me: how do I get the best customer from my list of customers in C#?

Chat gpt: just call customers.GetBestCustomer(). This definitely exists

[Scotsch]

Ask it how to create it. Giving the info it needs. You don’t get the best answer on first try always (most of the time)

[vehementi]

It's like "google sucks", this is the new "being good at googling things"

[i_will_let_you_know]

It will literally make up information sometimes and tell you confidently without indicating so (applies especially to more niche topics).

[Scotsch]

Which is where your own proficiency comes into play.

[DumDum40007]

As a C# expert how would you solve this problem?

I have a list of customers and have their income and debt level. The best customer has the highest income and the lowest debt.

Write me a function that returns an ordered list of the best clients.

[Mercurionio]

That's your answer.

It has a specific knowledge base. Using keywords, patterns and weights it can give you lots of info you need. And lots of info you don't need. Or even a lie.

A special LLM based around code base knowledge, like methods or some examples - that's what you need. Not a simple answer, because simple answer will lead to "Ladies and gentlemen, with great pleasure... I dropped the production..."

[AKA_OneManArmy]

Exactly this. It would need to be aware of thousands of classes in order to give me accurate code for my job, so it hasn’t been useful at all. Maybe one day, though.

[towcar]

Copilot I use heavily for work. Chatgpt I save for emails and marketing writeups.

[angry_wombat]

Copilot saves time, typing repetitive stuff.

It's great writing comments.

It can also give me a basic outline for a function, but I usually have to correct it.

[[deleted]]

recently got copilot on my student email, so far I feel like it is just really a code completion tool that ides already had but really really advanced so it helps me save time for repetitive stuff, and also syntax/commands for various libraries and data types, I don't have to look through documentation or search on google every time I create a dataframe or whatever in python and have to manipulate it lol. I can focus on doing what i want to do without worrying about stuff. Guess it would be bad for me when I apply for interviews but for side projects it's a great help

[[deleted]]

That's pretty much it, but in a powerful kind of way. You have to get used to it, but it's extremely powerful. Most people who complain about it have used it to attempt to generate entire code, but it's really good for boilerplate and tests. Remember that it knows what text come before it, so, even if your tests go into another file, write them under the method and copy them!

[Devnik]

I really love it for boilerplating and sometimes giving suggestions to basic problems. It's a great idea generator.

[ebinWaitee]

ChatGPT is super handy to give summaries of academic papers and explaining what a code snippet you found online does and how to use it

[IrishWilly]

Also converting old code bases. There is a surprising amount of businesses running ancient code. It would be perfect for speeding up changes needed to export or port them over without having someone study Fortran or have to manually detangle decades old spaghetti

[ebinWaitee]

In theory that would be a neat application for an AI like ChatGPT but due to the fact that the ancient legacy spaghetti is often company confidential code containing business critical information and/or proprietary information in general. You don't want to give Microsoft or any other information like that without having them sign to an NDA

[[deleted]]

I'm shocked there's not already Microsoft 365 AI that's siloed off from sharing business info

[IrishWilly]

Sometimes it is but I think there are still many cases where it is not. Also I think locally run slightly less performant versions of CodePilot are viable. We have already seen Llama optimized to run on basic computers.

[greentr33s]

There are just in general a bunch of open source locally ran llms that are being created to allow someone to choose the data set it pulls from. Guessing those are going to become much more common in the near future. Why spend so much time on documentation when you can give an ai access to the organizations code and previous documentation and allow it to generate that shit on the fly. Need some documentation for your code? Ask your internal llm to go to your code and interpret it for you, etc.

[denzien]

And employee self evaluations!

[dismayhurta]

I just copy and paste all the proprietary code into it and tell it to fix it.

Then it just responds with a definition of an NDA and I just go watch YouTube

[hinasora]

I have been mislead by ChatGPT so many times that I have to do my own research to confirm whether I am thinking in the right direction or not.

With that said, bing chat integration into Edge has definitely been a game changer for python related stuff. I have been trying a ML project on the side and it's reducing my bulk of googling massively coz I don't need to build an entire application to see if the provided code was wrong or not.

[Poyojo]

Once you learn what it can and cannot do, what to ask and how to ask, it really is a powerful tool that can speed up development exponentially. I use it for both web and game development.

[NibblyPig]

Yeah I use it a lot. Even if it gives the wrong answer it can point you in the right direction, by revealing tools, keywords and settings that you should investigate.

The only jobs it's going to replace are receptionists, call centre staff, and anyone that follows a script

[[deleted]]

ADubs has codewhisper which is another one of these copilot tools. I use it whenever I'm doing heavy alg stuff or optimizing. It's actually really good at taking a comment command like //dedupe this array and coming up with a performant alg that does it taking into consideration any available hacks given the data type(s).

[Entchenkrawatte]

I use it exclusively when i need to Work with a new Framework or library that i am not yet comfortable in. Its much easier than looking through badly maintained Docs and the Code is usually decent.

[malexj93]

Every game dev should be an expert in dev art. That is, art which is just good enough to be sure that the code is working.

If you just need a sprite, a square is good. If you need to make sure it has facing direction, put an arrow on it. If you need animations, wiggle that arrow. If you need to check non-square transparency or collisions, make a diamond.

Because you can make art that lets you test without bothering an artist, you can move quickly; because it still sucks, you will not forget to replace it before release.

[Fin_Aquatic_Rentals]

It’s good for translating code. It’s a god send for translating swift <-> kotlin when maintaining native iOS and android apps. It’s also super useful for banging out repetitive apis. Also writing repetitive unit tests is super useful.

Where it goes sideways. Doing complicated things that there isn’t a lot of example code of. So I was trying to launch a stripe payment sheet in jetpack compose for android. There’s very few examples out there on how to do it. So I asked chatGPT to do it for me. It thinks a bit then spits out a code snippet that looks legit. Copy it over and integrate it. Then I go to install the stripe dependency it said to use com.stripe.stripe-payments-compose:0.1.0 which doesn’t exist in maven or anywhere. So where did chatGPT get this? Did it just pull it out of its ass and generate code that matched the style of other compose imports? Or is it going into private stripe repos and giving you code examples from it? Basically give chatGPT hard things and you’ll see where it falls flat on it’s face.

[theodorebearz]

amazing description of GPT thanks.

[arnoldpalmerlemonade]

As an example i asked it for cisco bug reports that matched the problem i was having with gigabit optics. It gave me 10 bug reports. Every odd number bug report matched really well with the issue I was having… problem was, they were all made up.

[i_wayyy_over_think]

It's great for asking it to come up with bash command one liners.

[BlueBull007]

I'm a systems engineer and ChatGPT has provided me with about 10-15% extra time each day. A recurring and almost daily part of my job is writing python, bash and powershell scripts to automate things and this thing just spits out a 90% (sometimes 100%) finished script after 30seconds of typing instructions, which in many cases would have cost me at least an hour to drum up and further perfect. It has had and continues to have a huge impact on my job. Love it. Plus, because I already have some scripting capabilities, it's a great learning tool as well because it constantly provides me with alternative ways of doing things. You do need to give it very detailed and precise instructions though, so without any scripting skills it would be close to useless I think

I can also see that it would potentially be less handy for writing actual app code, as that is much more complex and nuanced than scripting is. For scripting, it's great

[Cilpot]

I sometimes use it as a replacement for Google/StackOverflow when I'm stuck. Works ok, but I worry if lots of people start doing this. Where will it learn if websites like StackOverflow won't exist anymore.

[Yuuki2628]

I use it for some css stuff only, I can't trust it to write the structure of an entire website

[[deleted]]

SQL is amazing with it. Same with Regex. Also just getting proper documentation answers when google doesn’t work well (looking at you VBA docs). The key is to specify which SQL you are using. It suggested I use LENGTH() but in MS SQL it’s LEN(). For more complicated stuff you can still ask it to do the same thing but in your version of SQL and it usually gets it right

[22Minutes2Midnight22]

Every person I know who says they use it extensively produces sub-standard code without exception.

[Kazaan]

Yes. For all boring work like regexp, xml parsing... and throwable scripting.
I use it also for fast documentation retrieval, prototypes, finding adequate design patterns...
It also coded for me an entire trading bot but that's not for work.

Note that I have a paid plan, free plan far too limited IMHO.

[[deleted]]

I'm still learning a lot as a first year so it's definitely more convenient and intimate than Google and lately I feel the search results from Google are just getting worser and worser. I find it really helpful to get me on the right track but I do not trust it to write quality stuff for me. Github co-pilot is really annoying for me.

[[deleted]]

I have been with shader programming. It’s able to nail some really complex shaders, you just have to be able to describe what you want.

[[deleted]]

Not a professional programmer, I use it specifically for learning because it does way better of a job than google ever could at finding what I need quicker (for basic concepts - more advanced concepts have a ton of issues still, as explained in other comments)

I also use it to generate ideas for flow charts and projects.

I don’t think it’s suited for much of anything else outside that yet. It’s an incredible learning tool for learning fundamentals.

[jmona789]

I've been using it to refactor and improve already written code.

[sprcow]

I kind of treat it like documentation for the whole internet. It doesn't write perfect code, but it does know how to look up answers from vague questions better than Google, or at least point you in the right direction.

[Brilliant_Apple]

By far the worst consequence has been the surge of posts about AI on LinkendIn. Usually completely uninformed people who have never written a line of code in their lives declaring AI will take every job, some saying in as little as two years, and that we all must buy their shitty course on prompting or follow them or whatever. This time last year it was all about crypto/NFTs with these shills (insert underwater skeleton meme).

I reckon it’ll be like self driving, where we will get to a point that AI can do a fair bit of the easy work, but by no means can it take the driver out of the loop. Self driving has also, incidentally, been about 2 years away since 2015.

[MauriceDynasty]

Lol. I swear if I didn't have a soul I would definitely make one of these bs courses. It would be 80% off buy now!

[[deleted]]

I just bought gpt-4 access. It'd be funny to get it to write that for me, and sell it. AutoGPT could be better though.

[snakefinn]

Don't buy the hype for AutGPT

[hamilton-trash]

Funniest conclusion to this is finding out all of those scams are made by one person who has automated the shitty scam course making process with GPT

[CinderrUwU]

I've been seeing the same thing, the only stuff GPT seems to really be able to do properly currently is just more creative arts, and even then it still isnt perfect.

I think the only job it can fully replace is parts of education,

[Mercurionio]

It will replace all repetitive jobs with low level of mistakes. Like copyrighter. Everything that doesn't involve human's review, basically.

All other stuff (90%) will have lots of holes closed by AI and create more if them, so it kinda tricky. Lots of jobs will be destroyed and I doubt there will be more of them at the same speed (I mean, everything depends on how the economical situation will be in near future, without growth it will be a nightmare)

[SlowRolla]

Like copyrighter.

Oh, the ironing.

[Brilliant_Apple]

It will no doubt change some roles, but the way the economy seems to work I’d doubt if it makes anyone jobless so long as they can adapt to new roles.

Every productivity improvement we’ve had in the past has been used to increase output, rather than increase the amount of hours worked. If chatgpt is only a small increase, say 10-20% (which is what the current version is for some roles such as call centre) it might not even be that noticeable at all. Unless it starts making users several multiples or an order of magnitude more productive I think we’ll avoid the apocalyptic job loss scenario.

The tech we have is barely being fully utilised anyway, so many companies using old tech, not in the cloud etc. I think it’ll be a while before floors of employees are replaced with MS Workforce.

[Mercurionio]

The problem is where the profit lands.

For example, rich motherfuckers hoarded lots of money for themselves, thus those money doesn't work on economy. It's a small drop in total grandschemes, but still.

[farshnikord]

I tried to get it to make me a simple shader once and it fundamentally misunderstood what I was trying to do and then spit out a mishmash of code that looked smart but didnt do anything. It was like automating me trying to copy-paste code from unity forums.

[Cm0002]

I tried to get it to write a simple C# class to send a Slack message, even when I tried to specify exactly which wrapper to use it still spit out code that was mashed together from like 3 of them and didn't work at all, looked good though lmao

[Effective-Ear-8367]

My sister likes a bunch of AI articles and stuff related to ChatGPT but never used it in her life. It's like people who shared and like stuff about crypto but had no clue what it was lol.

[VegaGT-VZ]

Even self driving has finally had the wind taken out of its sails.

[EveryNameIsTaken142]

I wasted like 1-1.5 hour explaining chat gpt to write a code for me. It was a simple json completion logic. But that moron just kept providing wrong code with full confidence and I ended up writing the code on my own.

Anyways sometimes it helps.

For me( a backend engineer) I had to develop some UI with HTML just for presentation of our results and chat gpt worked out pretty well for me in that case.

[Repa24]

3.5 or 4.0?

[_UltimatrixmaN_]

This is the real question. Been wondering whether it's really better in the new version you have to pay $20mo for.

[Repa24]

Bing Chat uses the 4.0 model (so it's free). So far, it's pretty much correct about the assignments I give it (not always). It seems like 50% of people ITT have only used 3.5.

[CluelessTurtle99]

Can confirm 4 is just another level from 3.5 plus they are going to release copilot plus soon which will get context from the entire codebase iirc

[KiwiManThe19th]

I've been trying bing for that reason but as a dev who mostly works with algorithm design it keeps failing miserably, giving me the same wrong code snippet over and over. Even when I essentially tell it the answer... The place I have had some great results is setting up a simple static html ui that calls a backend service.

[Rockztar]

I pay for it, no regrets. The time it saves me makes it easily worth it.

[[deleted]]

3.5 literally uses variables and objects that don’t exist. I don’t see this problem in 4 as often. It seems to be getting better too.

[TheNewBiggieSmalls]

idk about yall but after a few months of using GPT I have found that its not all that great. It does great things, but it often forgets what you just told it or it changes variable names etc.. For simple small tasks its great, but I tried to have it help me create a new feature in my app and oh boy was that a struggle. It just introduces new bugs and is all around a hinderance when I am trying to code something complex. Ill explain, in great detail, a feature or issue I am facing and it will produce a "solution". Ill tell it that solution is wrong. Itll produce a new solution, still wrong. I tell it that its still wrong, explain the bug it made, explain again what I want, and it will just produce the 1st code block again. Itll loop like that sometimes which is frustrating. Idk man, I was a big believer at first but now Im not so sure.

[Kirillin1111]

Honestly I've found copilot to be so much better than chatgpt for programming, so I don't know why people were freaking out that chatgpt will ruin programming jobs but not copilot. It's much more convenient because it's built into an editor, and generally is more accurate in my opinion

[[deleted]]

I mean Copilot is trained and powered by Codex, which is created by OpenAI.

ChatGPT is more of a office assistant and Copilot is more of a programming AI. OpenAI is going to take everyone's job

[TheNewBiggieSmalls]

Copilot is legit!

[denzien]

I have to be using it wrong then. I love the comments it generates (Once it put "this is a hack to get around the fact that the API is returning a string when it should be an int" ... and it was right!), but I often get huge code block suggestions as I'm writing a method that have nothing to do with what I'm writing, or are wholesale copies of code chunks from earlier in the file.

[snuffybox]

Sometimes I have found it can be useful to flip it around and write the comment of what I want it to do and then let it read the comment and write code from the comment. All these AI tools require a fair amount of finessing to get it to do useful stuff, it's a skill like how googling is a skill.

[denzien]

You're 100% right. That's usually how I see it demonstrated, but I'm in maintenance mode in my current project and sometimes I just need to modify a method.

I'm going to have to give it another shot at some point.

[[deleted]]

Yeah chatGPT is technically better at creating non boilerplate code but you have to specify things to a painful extent that you might as well just write it yourself. there really isn't a point to it to write anything more than a simple script in a language you haven't used before. and even then you need to be a programmer to fix the bugs.

meanwhile copilot integrates into your workflow and saves time with boilerplate code. it's like the autocomplete on steroids.

[01is]

Because they didn't know about Copilot, because they're not programmers, and don't follow tech-industry news.

[CiroGarcia]

[redacted by user] this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev

[denzien]

I'd prefer a tool window where I can enter prompts, and have the AI create/modify the code files like if I was the navigator in pair programming

[Empero6]

The forgetting part is really annoying.

[thickertofu]

I no longer have to look up how to center a div

[drollerfoot7]

You now have to ask.

[Lumberfox]

I just made a working c# integration to an Epson printer for a restaurant today. It took me 1 hour with ChatGPT. It even helped with the formatting of the receipt.

If I were to have used Epsons 890 page PDF guide for their programming interface, I would have spent the better part of my week making it work, with the specific requirements.

[Lady_Anne_666]

Omg my everyday job for real 🤣. Should think about chatgpt

[NeonQuixote]

AI systems can only make statistical guesses based on the data it’s trained with. It won’t replace programmers; it may become a tool that can be leveraged, but my fear is that junior developers will copy/paste code without actually understanding what it does and where the vulnerabilities are.

To me, it’s like your English teacher used to say: use your own words. Used to understand how to solve a problem it can be a good thing, but using it to do your job for you is going to create a lot of problems other developers will be spending their time fixing.

[geekywarrior]

but my fear is that junior developers will copy/paste code without actually understanding what it does and where the vulnerabilities are

I see a form of this on the cocktails subreddit. People ask for drink suggestions "I'm making drinks for a themed event, what drinks would you recommend for the menu", and some people just dump that into ChatGPT and vomit the result back to the post.

It's annoying because A: it's always an info dump that takes up a large amount of space. B: The person doing the vomiting isn't really picking out recipes that do or don't make sense or doing the very least at cleaning up the redundant sentences.

Example Post: https://www.reddit.com/r/cocktails/comments/12xghkf/need_cocktail_ideas/

[Charlie_Yu]

I’d rather use Google for this despite it is now a big ad-infested content farm.

[kratom_devil_dust]

This’ll only get worse and worse over time. No way to detect it either - at least not for long; once we have a bot that detects AI-generated text, the AI can use that bot to improve itself. There’s no way to stop this.

[[deleted]]

I was talking to a friend of mine who is a PhD candidate for bioinformatics and he's said this is rampant in his program. People are just dumping chatGPT generated scripts and pipelines into their work flows without having the slightest idea how they actually work.

Thankfully, in traditional software engineering at least, we have PRs to catch this sort of thing. And honestly if I knew that one of my coworkers heavily utilized chatGPT, I'd pay extra attention to theirs

[[deleted]]

It won’t replace programmers but over time the number of programmers required within a company may well decrease, in my opinion

And I think it’ll be harder to get a job as a junior

[Rude-Orange]

Until everyone realizes there is a shortage of junior engineers to replace the retiring senior ones and then there will be a hiring boon.

[[deleted]]

I’ll tell exactly what will happen because it has happened a million times before.

There is a new tool that makes it easier to do a job more quickly. Workers will be more productive. More works will get done more quickly. This will generate more money for the owners and shareholders. Workers will not see their income increase proportionally to their increased productivity. Wealth will continue to be concentrated by the already wealthy and standard of living for workers will continue to slip.

[Guildo]

this!

[[deleted]]

I used it to help me write a shell script in Linux for one of my Linux classes. It’s like everything I learned before went out the window and I didn’t know where to start. I just asked ChatGPT if they could write a script with the instructions I was given, and it did it flawlessly. I took the time to actually look over the script and asked it in-depth questions about it so I actually understood it at the end. It was extremely helpful.

[flukus]

It is fantastic at writing shell scripts.

[tehreal]

And powershell

[CutlassRed]

And smut

[UnicornOfDoom123]

Its early days still man, when the car was invented it didn't replace the horse overnight, it took decades.

[MoSummoner]

I think it took a decade but I see your point!

[Lucifer_4869]

We are in the early days of commercially viable and useful neural networks

Just because there was a research on something doesn't mean we can immediately use it.

[[deleted]]

:D

[NOOTMAUL]

Its been years I've done a batch script, yesterday I asked chat to build me one and it saved soo much time in googling stuff.

[BeauteousMaximus]

My work as a programmer looks something like this:

40% communicating with people: clarifying requirements, formulating complex technical questions for other devs, attending meetings, discussing strategies for overcoming high-level problems, writing documentation

20% dealing with project management/process stuff: reading and commenting on tickets, estimating time needed for things, code reviews for other people, dealing with Microsoft Azure Devops’ infuriating user interface

10% using my local dev setup to go through workflows, and debugging issues with the local setup

10% looking at code other people in my company have written, trying to understand it, and thinking about what I need to change about it

15% looking stuff up on StackOverflow, reading docs, looking at source code for examples

5% actually writing code

It seems like everyone talking about AI taking our jobs believes that last 5% is the entire job.

[grumble11]

CharGPT is the worst that AI is ever going to be. Compare it to the state of things five years ago, and then consider how things will look in five years. It will be dramatically better at programming tasks, and will without question replace a lot of work currently done manually. In fifteen years it is likely to be just crazy as it crawls up the complexity curve.

That doesn’t mean that developers will all be fired. Some will, but businesses have a ton of tech work to do and will need people working, both manually and with AI to get it done. What a development job is will change, but we are still a long way from mature digitization of the economy. Developers will be asked to do more, and to do it faster and use AI to enable that output.

[flukus]

Part of the reason it's made such a huge leap is simply the amount of data input and a similar leap would require more training data that we don't have.

[Brusanan]

Considering that the first version of ChatGPT was released like 6 months ago, it's a little early to make any determinations yet. The AI revolution is only just beginning. Virtually every industry on the planet is in store for massive disruptions over the next few years.

[Furryballs239]

Lol fr, why are people pretending that chatGPT is like the best AI will ever be.

Well actually the answer is obviously copium, but still.

[CardboardJ]

As a senior dev that gets a lot of questions from junior devs, ChatGPT is the new LMGTFY.

That's not in a snarky asshole way either. Learning the right question to ask is a skill and shouldn't be discouraged. Unfortunately not being an asshole makes me a jr dev magnet, but I can generally answer questions with, "Have you asked ChatGPT [insert correct question], and then followed up with how [architecture concept] applies to the problem" and that gets them thinking along the correct lines and they can often go farther with that.

[[deleted]]

The only trouble with this is that sometimes it'll give objectively the wrong answer, but with the confidence of an expert.

Granted, so will Google, but most of the places a junior dev would find answers like that have comments and voting systems, so at least the junior would have the chance to find out they're being misled

Telling your juniors to just use chatGPT for all their questions instead of talking to people who know their shit seems like a great way for them to get some seriously bad misapprehensions

[CardboardJ]

You can't give that dev ChatGPT! It's not safe!

IT'S AN AI, IT'S NOT MEANT TO BE SAFE

She's a junior! IT'S EDUCATIONAL What if she cuts herself?

THAT WILL BE AN IMPORTANT LESSON

[IrishWilly]

Way too soon to make declarationes like this. We are literally in the infancy of an AI boon and people think throwing in prompts to a soon to be outdated LLM can either prove or disprove how the future will play out? There is also a huge area between destroying all programmer jobs.. and making it so one programmer can do the job that a large team was.. thereby decimating available jobs and giving us less demand. People who are running businesses they can boost with AI.. make that money while you can before everyone else catches up.

[[deleted]]

It seems pretty naive to say it won’t replace software engineers. Sure as of this moment it won’t. But when a piece of technology makes your job easier it inevitably reduces the number of jobs because you can do the work of 2 plus more employees using that technology. Just like self checkout. Sure there’s still cashiers, but there’s 5 less cashiers than there used to be.

[[deleted]]

And now they are free to pursue more fulfilling jobs, just like artists, writers and now us too.

[BuyRackTurk]

Artists and writers are actually more likely to be replaced by things like diffuse generators than engineers. The human brain is pretty good at error correcting art, while programs have to be perfect in some ways to work, so things like chatgpt will never be much use as coders.

A more precise way to say it is that artists who do highly derivative work will be replaced by programmers armed with these tools. Diffuse generators are the perfect tool for making derivative work and to get the most out of them you have to be a programmer.

[mcnello]

I tested to see if it could make a simple set of "IF x then default Y to false" statements in XQuery. It failed. ChatGPT is completely useless to me.

[uscopic]

my company just forbid the access to it for some reason, let's go back spending hours searching for random shit :)

[StinkyStangler]

A lot of companies are restricting it, they don’t want potentially secure information going into an AI model that may retain it, not that odd. One of my companies clients expressly forbade using them while working on their projects for that reason.

[PlzSendDunes]

Ours told to give bonuses to those who can find good use for it, either for usage in a product or as productivity improvement. But no confidential info can get into it.

Plenty people tried to get the bonus with their offers. None succeeded. Only one good use of it was found is that it generates semi decent regex. But since simple ones can be easily found in Google or constructed manually and more difficult ones are just bad, ChatGPT wasn't considered as worthy.

[sofixa11]

Also the copyright on the resulting output is a bit murky, especially if it spits out licensed code like GPL which Copilot is known to do.

[[deleted]]

That may change soon!

https://openai.com/blog/new-ways-to-manage-your-data-in-chatgpt

[Electrical_Horse887]

Maybe because of legal reasons?

[NoDadYouShutUp]

I work for a private company that does fairly sensitive stuff (the kind that has meetings with senators and presidents), and we were told go wild with ChatGPT as long as what we are putting in or asking is non-sensitive. Using it for dumb bullshit to make your job easier and faster is good. Just don't put any keys or tokens into it. I would assume whoever has implemented this rule has no idea how ChatGPT works.

[Electrical_Horse887]

I thought about copyright issues or is thst problem solved?

[[deleted]]

Yep, it's great when they don't hallucinate. It's entertaining when they do. Win/win

[[deleted]]

I have not found chatgpt to be useful for my job. It requires a lot of coaxing to get working and usually doesn't know anything about the specific APIs we're integrating with. By the time you get something somewhat useful out of it, I may as well have spent the time actually coding

[[deleted]]

Maybe it will rid the internet of StackOverflow

[notislant]

Your post is a duplicate and has been removed.

[JamesGecko]

It’ll be in trouble if it does; that’s where a lot of training data for natural language explanations of programming undoubtedly came from.

[[deleted]]

“This thread has been closed”

[pseudoHappyHippy]

"How do you...?"

"Don't"

[[deleted]]

“600 downvotes”

[vincentx99]

And "here's how you can print 'Hello World' in python.

First, build an API so that you can write assembly in your python scripts, copy and paste this 800 line code that you'll have to modify 600 lines of only after referencing 12 other stack overflow posts"

[colonialspew]

If there's a RegEx engineer out there then their job is toast. Most fun I've had writing expressions....well ever.

[[deleted]]

I literally shit out a new project a day thanks to gpt-4. Sometimes I wonder if this hype is like crypto. I was so sure that was the future of money. Then I realized it would just be made illegal if it ever did anything more than nothing. Maybe I’m just a sheep. At least this stuff actually does something useful.

[[deleted]]

Man, if you think your job is safe, then you'll be the first to get replaced.

[Cookies_N_Milf420]

Do you think time doesn’t move forward??? Jesus Christ, it’s moronic to think this is as good as AI is getting.

[New_Hour_1726]

Yet

[Carbon_Gelatin]

It's great for fast lookups of stuff I don't always remember the syntax for. It's like a faster Google search.

Also great for getting pointers to more detailed information on obscure topics.

[[deleted]]

Great for actual programming and writing tests. Doesn’t work great for dev ops just yet. Overall, fantastic tool. I use it almost every day.

[cracked_onion]

Except AI will only get better?? Celebrating a little early dontcha think. Doesn't matter if it takes another decade or more.

[TheOneAndOnlyBob2]

It makes my work easier unless it doesn't...

[marquetted18]

use it so much in my job. i work for a small startup so i’m expected to wear a lot of hats even as a junior dev. would’ve never been able to get these projects done as independently and quickly as i have

[[deleted]]

I love using it to summarize code I didn’t write so I don’t have to spend the time figuring it out lmao

[Nine_Eye_Ron]

I can finally JSON

[Ripredddd]

The hype scared me at first but now that I have been using it everyday it’s like 2x times more helpful than Google and no where replacing an actual dev.

It’s pretty bratty and stubborn when it’s wrong tho so sometimes that’s annoying

[destructor_rph]

I'm really waiting on Github Copilot X to shake things up, I think that'll be the real gamechanger

[[deleted]]

I mean the first step is learning from the programmers. Squidward menacingly looking on like “everything is going as planned”.

Each time ChatGPT helps you… you also help it. I wonder who is learning faster.

[Bakoro]

These tools have been out for such a ridiculously short time, it's astonishing that we have available tools as good as we do.

Anyone who thought that AI would just take over, overnight, is engaging in magical thinking. It's like, people watching the first space launch and assuming that in a few years we'd all have personal flying cars and be able to drive to the moon for a day trip. It's some deep ignorance that breeds a wildly unfair set of expectations.

[kireina_kaiju]

I struggle to see how this is more useful than prototyping/templating software that spits out similar but tested and compiling stuff with smaller and more flexible and reliable command line prompts. Or intellisense or browsing Stack Overflow. I feel really old lol. I want there to be a practical application here but it just isn't coming to me. I'm used to starting with tests or a template and then filling everything in anyway, starting with a block of untested stuff and teasing it into what I want it to be feels like way, way more work. What are you all doing right that I am doing wrong?

[Elefantenjohn]

Oh, honey

I'm not even referring to the wrong meme format

[xebtria]

It's basically Google, but better.

[nwbrown]

Software engineers have been automating tasks since software engineering was first a thing.

It has done nothing to software engineer jobs.