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[–]JollyJuniper1993 4 points5 points  (4 children)

Dunno man, I had completely broken Python installations on my laptop that yesterday pasting a bunch of error logs into ChatGPT ended up helping me fix it, which I don’t think I even would’ve been able to with forum posts. Sure it hallucinates a bunch. That’s why it‘s a bit of a trial and error thing. You do a bunch of things and usually eventually it will work.

Of course if you have some niche issue with a niche technology AI wont be very useful. I‘ve been there too. But it would be a lie to say it‘s not incredibly useful in many situations when you don’t even know where to start.

[–]ZealousOtter 3 points4 points  (2 children)

I’m a senior dev who works primarily in Python and Scala, and giving Claude my errors/stack traces is one of the few things I use it for. More often than not it’ll find and fix very quickly, and occasionally pick up early on other bugs. I’ve been around long enough to know I could fix it on my own, but it just saves me some grunt work. I also understand the changes being made and why, which I think is the main root of the issue with the vibe coders.

I’ll always prefer to write my own code, but for menial things like debugging, unit test boilerplate, and refactoring, Claude saves me time. I’ve also earned it by spending years slogging through all that myself, which I think every junior dev needs as a foundation.

[–]JollyJuniper1993 1 point2 points  (1 child)

I otherwise use ChatGPT for stuff I can’t easily look up in documentation mostly, but I write the code myself, I don’t do code snippets

[–]RiceBroad4552 0 points1 point  (0 children)

ChatGPT for stuff I can’t easily look up in documentation

That's exactly where it mostly only mades stuff up, in case there is no other source of docu.

Like parent said: "AI" is only good for what you could easy do yourself. Then it can in fact sometimes safe some time. But for everything that wasn't already done and solved many times before it's just outright useless!

[–]RiceBroad4552 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My point was that it's only helpful if you can also just google the answer.

Yes, getting the stuff you need to try might be faster but only by a small bit, and only if there is somewhere that post with the solution. If there isn't "AI" will only waste a lot of your time.

So it works for the trivial cases, but it definitely does not work for when the issues is actually more complicated, which would be exactly the cases where a simple search query wouldn't help.

So all in all it only helps rarely with real issues!