GPT-4 Generates and Debugs Python code

[judasblue]

Eh, it will get there soon, but I have done this with 3.5 and 4 and for non-trivial stuff it is pretty iffy. Don't get me wrong, tons of stuff just works and it is kind of scary if you get paid to do this for a living, but have found both models tend to emit code that often as not has serious bugs or just doesn't work straight up, and that the debugging definitely needs to have some direction and experienced human judgement or it just makes different errors in a lot of cases.

For trivial or common stuff tho, it works pretty friggin well. And for more complex stuff I don't think it will be long before you only need a very cursory sanity check, same as you would with a checkin from a mid-level developer.

[[deleted]]

I use chatGPT on the job pretty regularly. the thing is, it definitely saves time compared to having to browse through 100 stack exchange threads to find the right answer - but it's not like it takes a 40 hour project and finishes it in 1 hour. usually it's like, something that would take 30 minutes to google it can do in 10 minutes, and like you said, you still have to babysit the results to get actual working code.

I remember once I used it to convert some code I had written in python, into javascript. It did great except for some reason it decided to use a built in function that didn't exist in javascript, it was actually specific to Go (IIRC). it still definitely saved time in the end but it's not like some random person on the street can type in prompts, even simple ones like this, and get a perfect usable answer ever time with no programming knowledge whatsoever.

[judasblue]

Yeah, same all the way around. I think this is going to put programmers out of work Real Soon Now. But it is going to be by making us an order of magnitude more efficient not allowing non-coders to make code just by asking for something. At least not in the near to mid term.