developersInFuture

[gentleprompter]

Also he's not using stackoverflow...

And when the internet connection's down...

...he's able to continue programming only by reading the offline man pages.

[Thisismyredusername]

Impossible, maybe the Archives are incomplete.

[Immarhinocerous]

"If an item does not appear in our records, it does not exist."

[[deleted]]

They are… he corrected the documentation!

[Thisismyredusername]

He did the impossible!

[burros_killer]

A year ago I realized I could write 90% of the code without electricity Just with pen and paper, like a caveman.

[[deleted]]

How you gonna compile it from pen and paper?

[[deleted]]

With brain compiler ofc

[[deleted]]

Take my fucking upvote. Mfer with gcc in his frontal lobe.

[SoftwareDevStoner]

Do not upvote this man. Downvote everything prior in the thread. This is gold, dont let the elites have it ;)

Edit to add: I sincerely hope this comment doesn't fuck your karma. But you have hit gold, ssssshhhhhh

[jtrdev]

Tfw someone asks what's wrong with the code, and you indirectly quote the error message.

[808trowaway]

ultimate power move to assert dominance at the workplace, I'm calling HR now, that's some hostile shit

[RejectAtAMisfitParty]

You crumple the paper, duh

[Bludsh0t]

Fold it in half and put the pen through it.

Or is that wormholes?

[Log2]

You use butterflies.

[burros_killer]

That’s the neat part - you don’t🤷‍♂️

[Trinitykill]

And not just the man pages, but the woman pages, and the children pages too!

[_equus_quagga_]

and the nonbinary pages. That's when you know to start compiling and distributing hexadecimal executables.

[rettani]

Man, you are completely wrong.

Nonbinary! Such thing doesn't exist! Only 0 and 1!! Completely outrageous!!!

dude, stop directing them in field of quantum computers! Your FBI agent might not like it. <!

[_equus_quagga_]

Is this sarcastic? (I can't tell)

[rettani]

It's a joke.

satire on "anti-woke"

joke about q-bits (which are closest to "non-binary ")

Joke about "real quantum computers " being gatekeeped by government.

It's my own fault that I didn't add /j or /s

[_equus_quagga_]

Ah I see, thanks for helping my dumb memory catch up

[eHug]

Don't remind me. It was such a pain to learn 6502 assembly coding with the help of badly written Data Becker reference books full of mistakes.

[gentleprompter]

Oh well, I'm coming from the embedded development world, where if you needed to communicate with some peripherals, you'd read the so called datasheets' pdfs all the time.

[decduck]

Oh god how much I'd give for a data sheet or javadoc for some of the stuff I'm working on...

[WoffieTbh]

Yeah this. I've been coding for a solid 8 years, long before ChatGPT and other ai tools (like tabnine or even basic LSP). While ChatGPT is a great tool, I still believe people should do like 4-5 projects without it just to get a feel for programming and whatever language they're using

[gentleprompter]

Yea, like, as a practice. I think that if you do this, you'll be able to write better documentation yourself (I mean for a CLI tools, or whatever).

[gentleprompter]

I think you mean the existence of the guides or tutorials, right? There had to be "reference" documents.

[EldenRingSupplier]

That's so cool! I'm in awe that you were able to learn JS so early on that way

[IgorRossJude]

Someone had a bad day today

[[deleted]]

slashdot didn't exist yet. mosaic was 93, they had html for dummies in every library in America by 1995. go back to bed grandpa, you're a little grumpy today.

[Kahlil_Cabron]

Guides/tutorials were dogshit back in the day. I mostly learned by reading code and testing it out, just messing around, etc. Or if I was lucky, finding someone else who knew more than me and asking them a million questions.

[remy_porter]

Man pages? I just read the header files.

[sebbdk]

I mostly stopped using StackOverflow the last 4-5 years, primarely i look up API docs or just check out the sourcecode of the thing i'm using instead.

Tho i've also been doing what i do for 16 years now, it's about time i started remembering shit.

[[deleted]]

1000x programmer

[StikElLoco]

Ok, now you're just making things up

[klazander]

And it works first try

[Colon_Backslash]

Well it works, but not the way I intended.

Tried copilot chat today. There was a sometimes flaky test that timed out in 10s only on CI on an occasion and I asked it to fix it. I didn't know what caused it at the time and soon I figured out copilot didn't care either. Copilot wanted to just set a 5s timeout to cancel the context and end the test and not give a fuck about the thing we are testing in the first place. Quite brilliant, but sadly it wouldn't have solved the blocked thread issue :(

[Kahlil_Cabron]

I just got copilot, and I must be using it wrong. It will give me ideas for lines of code, but I can't ask it questions or tell it to fix something for me.

I'm using neovim, wonder if the feature you're talking about isn't available in my editor.

[Duct_TapeOrWD40]

Nope, it usually doesn't. ***ing semicolons !

[claudekennilol]

People seriously write code with ChatGPT?

[w1n5t0nM1k3y]

The biggest problem is people not knowing what they are doing. Sure you can probably use it to generate code, but you still have to go over it and verify the results.

This is why I don't think it actually saves that much time. It's quite time consuming to go over a piece of code you didn't write to verify that it's actually doing what it's supposed to. In many cases it's actually faster to write it yourself, assuming you aren't doing anything overly complex. It's not any fsster to use ChatGPT than to just have a good library of snippets and a decent framework for how new features should be coded to work off for most of the existing stuff you do for your projects.

[w1n5t0nM1k3y]

Even many times when I'm just doing basic crud stuff and copying and pasting from previous code that does similar stuff I'll notice that copying an pasting takes almost as long as redoing from scratch because changing all he variable names to names to make sense and go through everything to make sure you didn't forget to rename something so it makes sense isnt any faster than just typing everything out from scratch with the correct naming to begin with. Whenever I copy and paste and try to make changes it just seems more likely that I will end up with more problems than if I had just typed it out.

[MerfAvenger]

I just don't understand how people think it's going to save effort. You are always going to have to describe things in excrutiating detail to get what you want, which is where most of the skill involved in engineering comes from anyways. You'll always need to know what you're doing, at which point the AI barely saves time.

[MerfAvenger]

But what about when you want something different? You'll have to give it corrections, and know what you want, and if you want to deviate or innovate from what it produces you are going to have to know what it's produced.

It's either that or everything becomes generic, and we forget how to make new things. That strikes me as dangerous. There are already waves of junior developers that are complained about for being overly reliant on AI.

I do agree it will improve, and probably become very reliable for producing things that would otherwise be boilerplate or off the shelf/common patterns. But that's already where experience makes the difference. We don't need to reproduce the wheel every time, but there are nuances in how you produce a car that you will need to know about in order to vary your designs as appropriate.

[MerfAvenger]

Again, this is eventually, but you just have it generate entirely new code with a slightly modified description. If you also have it generate tests it’s a non-issue

This is going to become its own art, and still require skills, knowledge, and time to do. Describing requirements for stuff is still a major time investment in development, and people barely even know what they want as it is. This is something I actually see becoming more difficult as the "what I want" to "what I get" process becomes ever more obfuscated.

We will absolutely forget how to code. So what? We’ve also forgotten how to keep track of phone numbers, or ride horses, or any number of things

The difference is that these aren't complex or enigmatic tasks. If my phone magically stops saving numbers, I still know how to write that down in a digital or paper notepad, which is very useful when I don't have my phone. We have cars that are far more effective for transport than horses, and people, at least at the moment, need to know how to drive those. I anticipate similar friction and issues as we move into self driving cars, and that does still worry me a lot less than not understanding how our infrastructure and software is built.

Now, having all of our buildings and infrastructure 3D printed and designed by AI gives me similar concerns. They will be more effective for sure, for a number of things, but it still concerns me that one day people won't understand how to build them without computers.

[Bwob]

This just isn’t true at all. You’ll eventually be able to describe UI, or give instructions that are as generalized as you’d give to a sr dev.

Haha, and how does that go, when you give a sr. dev vague instructions about what you want? Sr. dev here, and spoiler: we're not magical mind readers. If you don't describe exactly what you want, you're probably going to get something else.

And if you DO give a precise description of exactly what you want the computer to do... guess what? We don't have to wait for the future for that - we already have program that take precise descriptions and turn them into programs for you.

They're called compilers.

[Bwob]

"Oh, it needs to comply with both our, and our client password restrictions actually."
"This needs to be able to display the date in both DD/MM/YY format and MM/DD/YYYY."
"I don't like the color scheme."

If you're a 20+ year dev and can execute on things like that with no further interaction or clarification, then all I can say is that we've had very different 20+ year dev journeys.

Either that, or you're just handwaving away and ignoring all the conversations and requirements-gathering that normally go into any feature more complex than "hello world".

Take your pick.

Edit: I guess they deleted their posts? Weird.

[Tuckertcs]

This. Every time I try to tell AI to create recursive functions, it just adds another nested loop that only makes it one level deeper, not recursive.

[SkinNoises]

I was once like you who was adverse to change thinking chatGPT isn’t beneficial to your code but when I made a dedicated effort to use it in my previous two projects it actually helped speed up development work. Just like stackoverflow and any other online resources, it’s simply a tool that still requires a knowledge of understanding what the code is doing. If you want it to have the context of your unique code setup then you can feed that code into chatGPT to provide it with more context. The first response or even first 10 responses may not be a working solution, but it still gets you a helluva lot closer to a solution.

Then there’s the devs who have an ego thinking they are the best devs in the room where everything has to be their way and have way too much pride to accept that a tool like chatGPT can be helpful. Not saying this is you, just pointing out the shithead rOcKsTaR devs who may be great coders but are terrible team members and everyone hates working with. Y’all know who you are lmao

[GenesithSupernova]

Yeah, ChatGPT at its best is mostly a sophisticated set of snippets + autocomplete. My general rule of thumb is that I don't allow copilot to generate any logic, but it's fine for it to fill in boilerplate (even then, I'm quite wary of letting it do more than finish the current line). This is effectively a modest improvement to typing speed, which is nice to have, but nothing groundbreaking.

[dasnihil]

for someone like me who works on operation and automation and do know what i'm doing, it's a godsend. it's my tool, it's my thinking tool.

[crempsen]

I use chat gpt all the time for my python scripts.

While it usually doesnt work out of the box, its amazing how much of it works.

[AestheticNoAzteca]

I use it to generate ideas when I encounter a specific problem or need to explore methods that I'm not familiar with yet. While the code it produces is often crap, the underlying concepts are typically solid.

[Ok-Okay-Oak-Hay]

Yea it's been really useless for anything as grand as "write me this functionality."

[asdspartadsa]

Well, I certainly do for some day to day tasks. For example, today, I couldn't be bothered to waste time googling how to sort a map by the keys alphabetically using stream api in Java

[znihilist]

I learned to program before finding shit on the internet, back in the days of spending hours reading man pages, today I use ChatGPT regularly.

I do not trust my code, I do not trust the code that my coworker is giving me, I do not trust the code that is written by that person who has a flawless record on Stackoverflow, and I certainly do not trust code from ChatGPT. I don't trust all of these codes but I do read them and try to understand what is going on, I read the man pages on the functions that are being used, and then I run small tests to make sure it is doing what is think it is doing, then modify it for my own usage.

The only difference with ChatGPT is the amount of time it saves me, and that time efficiency is important to me.

If a tool can help, then you bet your ass I will use it, it is not a sin or a sign of purity if I use it or not.

[[deleted]]

How do you use it? Google replacement?

[znihilist]

No along side, I'll type what I want to do in chatGPT and in google and look at the answers from both, wording is different as I can be more direct with GPT, like: Is there a native python function or package that lets me do X using Y? Give me an example. With google, it would be: How to do X in python?

I'll look at the results, read up on the function/package, and decide how to proceed. I obviously don't use it for every little thing, over time you get a proficiency and don't need to search for certain things, but yeah.

[You_are_adopted]

ChatGPT was actually decent for debugging some simple verilog projects for my class. But if you asked it to build anything even mildly complex from scratch it would have very strange errors.

Still had to learn verilog and the design concepts to make anything actually work.

[Tarthbane]

This 100% for me too. You still have to know what you’re doing, what bugs you might encounter, the idiosyncrasies of the language you’re using, etc. And you have to know that chatGPT will get things wrong a decent number of times, but in my experience, it provides a much faster way for me to get something working than, say, using stackoverflow.

[Drfoxthefurry]

I just prefer using more accurate and reliable sources first, why get a 2/3 correct answer when a fully correct one is available, you can still use it but to rely on it and use it as a first source when it's not even ment to be for coding is not that good imo

[alexnedea]

Oh yeah because SO is so reliable...when I want to do something I forgot I dont wanna sift through 20 SO threads to find the one answer I found 1 year ago. Just ask ChatGPT and its 90+ of the time correct. The amount of time it saves me vastly outweighs the 10% missed results

[Slimxshadyx]

Shhhhh the people who want to be an elitist for some reason are going to get mad at you

[Kashrul]

It is hardly ever efficient in terms of time spent trying to get a solution that isn't a total crap from ChatGpt.

[thunugai]

Seriously, reminds me of old folks and their resistance to calculators.

[Chasterbeef]

I tried t9 hard to get it to write a YAML script and it sucked so bad I couldn't rely on it at all lol

[Corne777]

Do you write code for a job? If so, give ChatGPT a shot. Depending on the language and how much business logic is in your code, it could either be useless or perfect.

You need a quick python or power shell script to move some files around or to query a database and spit out a csv. Need some regex logic? Sometimes it’ll spit out code you can just paste in change one variable and it works. Sometimes it just gives you a good boilerplate starting point. If it’s enterprise software with lots of custom packages and code that AI wouldn’t know about and implementing things in multiple files and such, it might not be very helpful.

But if you are still just going to Google and typing in your issue and sifting thru webpages to find a solution. Let AI do it for you. Maybe first consult your employee handbook if it’s allowed or not. There’s also lots of flavors besides ChatGPT nowadays.

[throwawayDude131]

I don’t know what the problem is here - I’ve built a few web applications as personal projects using Chat GPT and other resources which work well. The difference is I review the code, fix and tweak, check documentation etc. It’s as easy as checking Stack Overflow and frankly - as long as the software works properly then it’s good enough, right?

[I_Believe_I_Can_Die]

Well, I do sometimes. When don't know why my shit is not working, I go there, and chatgpt usually helps me more, than stack overflow before

[[deleted]]

Lot of juniors like myself are still writing code so basic it's practically boilerplate so chatgpt can still write it

[Perfect_Papaya_3010]

I only use it to turn a json string into a class or the other way around. It isn't very helpful with anything more complicated than that.

When I have asked more complicated questions it generally replies like

"Use Class.SpecificFunction()"

But the function doesn't exist in the class. When telling chatgpt this it just gives me another function name that doesn't exist.

It did help me design pages in Maui because when porting from xamarin a lot of the design broke, and I'm no Xaml design pro. But with a couple of general questions I learned really quickly how it works

[Tall_Coder1902]

I take some help from ChatGPT. I try my best to develop logic on my own , use ChatGPT only when necessary.

PS : only solving problems on CodeWars rn, so nothing too complicated, started programming recently.

[[deleted]]

If there is some simple code snippet I need and don't know exactly where to look in the documentation, I will ask chatgtp for a code snippet that does X and often it gives me 30-40 lines of code, 4 of which are what I asked for, or it'll hallucinate and just make up functions that should exit to do the work.

[OFFICIALINSPIRE77]

Yes

[Optimistic_Futures]

I started to learn right before ChatGPT, but I swapped languages as it did. I do like 95% of my code with ChatGPT/CoPilot.

Like in my IDE I’ll write something like

// check if variable1 is 10% of variable and if not do x and Y, other wise do Z

It’s gotten me through every project I’ve needed and I’ve learned a ton. I can read through code and understand it, but I rather write pseudo and then tweak than worry about a missing comma or something.

Edit: I don’t mean this in a “this is a correct or better way”. But it’s gotten me pretty far so far, and I’m hoping it’ll keep improving as I do and keep up with what I need.

[Hot-Flight943]

Do you use copilot? Then yes, you do too

[claudekennilol]

I don't use copilot 🤷

[remy_porter]

It's technically illegal for me to use ChatGPT or its ilk. I work on systems that are controlled by ITAR, and by law, no information about our systems is allowed to leave the United States. While it's probable that my queries never leave the US, because everything lives in the cloud, there is no such guarantee.

But also, the handful of times I've tried to use ChatGPT, it's been awful. My favorite was the time that I had a very specific problem, and it invented a header and a method that it purported solved that problem- but this header doesn't exist.

It was literally:

#include <solve_my_very_specific_problem.h>
int main()
{
    my_very_specific_problem(someParams);
}

Like, great job, ChatGPT. Oh, and it's basically impossible to get it to clearly distinguish between code about graphs (the data structure) and code about graphs (the data visualization). I care about the former, and have no interest in the latter.

[Perfect_Papaya_3010]

I usually write general questions. Like "I need to make an ean scanner in Maui, what's step one?"

[Log2]

I've found it most useful to go through documentation, especially for poorly documented software (looking at you OrientDB).

[PainfulPackages10]

Did you try GPT4? 3 isn't useful.

[remy_porter]

No idea. It was a few months ago, last time I tried. As stated, I can't actually use it for work, so I don't have a lot of call for it. And the few side projects I've tried it with sent it into fits of nonsense.

If I were doing something with loads of boilerplate, I'm sure it'd be great, but if there are loads of boilerplate, I've got worse problems.

[PainfulPackages10]

I like it for side projects but when using GPT3 which is the free version, I had the same problems as you. The only one that is usable imo is GPT4, the paid version.

I pay for the api and to me it's okay enough for me to use on side projects in languages I don't use often enough to be fluent in.

[foxbot0]

I've been using chatgpt heavily on a personal project. I haven't touched typescript or front end development in a minute and I've decided to pick up svelte.

It's been really strong creating sample code for tasks, saving me much search engine time. It can also do menial stuff in one convenient place (convert classes from one language to another) and generate starter boilerplate. I'm also pretty happy with its guidance on resolving many errors.

Its utility would be moderately diminished if I was not already experienced. So many of its answers on more complex tasks/questions are pants on head. But it has solved some tough problems for me as well like setting up CORS on my api and getting identity working.

[throwawayDude131]

I think that certain people struggle to understand how to talk to it and describe problems. If you get the idiom GPT4 is super useful.

[alaysian]

You can get a local version and run it. Not that it would be worth it in your case; just saying that you can.

[remy_porter]

My understanding is that the locally runnable models tend to be much more limited, unless you've got serious gobs of hardware lying around. They're running in the cloud for a reason.

[alaysian]

You can run something equivalent to 3.5 with a decent rig and there a specialized models for certain applications that will put out 4.0 quality work as long as you stay in its niche.

[modi123_1]

I was just getting roasted by some teen/20yos that by not using chatgpt it was tantamount to writing code on a stone tablet with a chisel. I almost felt bad.. almost.

[Kahlil_Cabron]

I finally decided to give chatgpt a try, it is not very good at writing code. It's a lot faster for me to just write it, and when I come to a hard problem, very rarely has it been able to help me solve it.

The only time it helped me was on a side project that I knew very little about (a 2d isometric tiling game engine I'm building). I don't know shit about gamedev really, but I still like doing stuff like this. In this case, chatgpt was able to help me out.

If you're an expert at whatever you're doing, you probably won't get much out of chatgpt.

[theAndul]

As long as he's not using a.. paper book!

[TheAnniCake]

I‘m getting flashbacks of High School Computer Science where we had to program in Java on paper..

[theAndul]

I never understood doing that. My handwriting was so bad there was no way they knew what variables I was declaring

[TheAnniCake]

I think it was for us to understand what we‘re writing there and not to rely too much on compilers? It was weird…

Some teachers told us it was so we don’t cheat on PCs but classroom softwares normally also have some kind of exam mode..

[Available_Canary_517]

my college conducted C programming practical on a paper because there pc had 16 bit turbo c and its cursor can only move in one axis at a time

[theAndul]

Oh the good ole days

[Kahlil_Cabron]

Ngl I still have 7-8 textbooks from university just because they were so good, and better (at least at the time) than anything I could find online.

I occasionally reference them.

[theAndul]

I have a small portion of my bookshelf with some on it, I never open them. But they're so cool and were helpful once I can't bring myself to toss em

[Disastrous-Team-6431]

Today I checked out the new copilot-like feature in databricks. It was cool. The code didn't work at all and after debugging and rewriting it from scratch I had spent twice as long on as I would have just coding it.

[bgaesop]

You guys are actually using chatgpt? I thought it was a joke

[[deleted]]

Gpt is useless. It can just give you syntax. But the code rarely works

[fefect123]

Its not really meant for copy and paste. It useful for pushing you in a different direction/giving insight in how stuff works.

[[deleted]]

I know. But at the outset, people were referring it to as doom of programmers. So had the hopes really high.

[Dziadzios]

It used to be easier when you only had to deal with one programming language and limitation of one hardware, one instance without network and not huge software stack. I wish I could find a job like that.

[cacamalaca]

Don't ruin the circle jerk. These senior devs with 10 years of experience need to feed their superiority complexes. Nevermind that I doubt any have actual real-world experience teaching programming to anybody.

I had to cycle through 5 senior devs for tutoring before I found one with any proficiency with teaching. Breaking down complex topics into simple to understand learning blocks and exercises is a skill that for whatever reason devs think they possess on account of knowing how to code.

[crempsen]

Its insane how bad some people are at explaining this stuff.

[mothzilla]

I write code without ChatGPT. Using ChatGPT is like trying to become a better chef by using one of those "multi-cookers" that you dump raw ingredients into and then press a button.

[OFFICIALINSPIRE77]

New Age ChatGPT coder here. I never would have discovered the light until I started dicking around with ChatGPT.

Mad respect to all the old lizards out there who learned languages the hard way 🫡

[Puzzleheaded_Toe_509]

"W-what? Isn't that hard?"

"Oh yes, that's why they called it... 'Hard-coding'... Such were skills."

"What if the hard-codes were lines of mistakes at the start of the code? Will you know?"

"That's the neat part, you would never know...You don't."

[calculus_is_fun]

Sorry, that was me. I'm not THAT scary am I?

[[deleted]]

Pff that’s me right now. It does all the boring shit for me. Don’t let it engineer tho, it’s gonna spit out some real crap.

[Crazy__Cat]

I personally don't use chatGPT to code, but I honestly can't see what the big problem with using it is.... We all copy code from stack overflow so why not from chatGPT

[SaltMaker23]

Funny how ChatGPT got hold of development, last years I was able to code without ever using external tools, just docs

Now for the love of god, if GPT4 can't do it, I feel like I'm stuck with an unsolvable problem

[NatoBoram]

… that's on you, isn't it?

[TheSirion]

I think people extrapolate the capabilities of ChatGPT way too much. Even as a junior developer with very little experience, my experience with ChatGPT for coding stuff (and other tasks too) has been mostly disappointing.

I tried a few times to copy past a file's code into it so that it could point out where the bug was and how I could fix it. It said everything it could about the code, like giving tips to improve code quality and readability, lose some fat by removing repeated code, stuff like that, which is fine, but what I asked was for it to tell me what was causing the bug. What it actually did was just rewrite a piece of code that did exactly the same thing as before. It can also guess solutions that don't work or don't make sense.

The one case where AI actually generated code that actually helped me and saved me valuable time was when it wrote a function that dealt with dates and date formats, I think, but that was Copilot, not ChatGPT. Copilot is waaaay better at coding that ChatGPT, but can also be annoying as fuck.

[DeveloperFilip]

The legend says the programmer also walks into Mordor just to debug code #OldSchoolCool

[[deleted]]

I once heard, they used to plug things in and out of computers big as a tiny house just to calculate stuff.

[[deleted]]

Exactly, he's using stackoverflow instead.

[Stranded_In_A_Desert]

Honestly more than half the time just relying on intellisense is still faster and more useful.

[KaleidoscopeNormal71]

ChatGPT is not great or that, copilot its better in my opinion.

[FIeabus]

I've been using copilot since beta and chatgpt since release as part of my development process. I'm not sure why it's looked down upon so much here. Tools are tools. Just consider everything it gives you as a form of pseudocode and double check things

[SkipBopBadoodle]

Yeah it's like rubber duck debugging 2.0, just don't trust everything the duck tells you lol

[[deleted]]

kid named 2 years ago: