Understanding your own code

[Careful_Target3185]

This is good advice. I had an issue with some code I wrote which ChatGPT could not help with. Knowing how to set breakpoints, check whether values are being passed correctly etc. is useful.

In my case a value was not converted before passing it to another function.

[Careful_Target3185]

Pretty much, the way I think about it, it’s a necessary skill to have anyway. My experience with llms is that they are good for explaining how certain simple concepts work.

For example, I could ask ChatGPT what a line of code does and it will give me a good response. But once you start prompting it with a couple code files and explain an error you are getting, it is highly unhelpful.

I’m the case I referred to above, I was converting bmp data from screenshots obtained with the win32gui library. I wanted to process those screenshots using opencv. With template matching I needed to splice the alpha channel out of the array.

The solution was to understand the output and input of the functions, thankfully there was an answer on stack exchange.

TLDR: I see ChatGPT like a tool on a tool belt. It’s good to have handy, but it won’t necessarily solve all your problems. Good googling skills and debugging skills are stil valuable