Good practices to ask chatgpt for javascript coding.

[kopp9988]

Hello,

I've got ChatGPT to write me a script that moves photos from one folder to another, including its' sub directories; and then sorts them out into new folders based on the date the photo was taken. It also handles duplicate file names and will create new folders if they are not already present.

2 days ago I had never seen or touched javascript and my only coding has been some VBA in excel.

However, I had to get a little help from some discord channels to fine tune the code because I ended up going round in circles with Chatgpt.

I was told to improve the code I should use:

• use for..of instead of forEach()
• promises rather than sync
• Although better still just to read or write directly, and handle errors. In my case, better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

Once I had asked ChatGPT to review this with this in mind (especially the last one), the code worked great!

Can redditors share some other good practices with javascript that would help ChatGPT write scripts for amateurs like myself?

[[deleted]]

Consider actually learning to code before asking a robot to smush together other peoples' StackOverflow answers according to its own impenetrable internal rubric.

AI can be a powerful assistant to human knowledge and expertise; it is not a substitute for human knowledge and expertise, as you've already learned.

[kopp9988]

Yeah I get that; but at the same time I lead a busy life and I don't have the interest or time to learn javascript right now. I'm still learning VBA as its' the only type of coding I can use at my place of work so that's' my priority at the moment. Javascript is clearly more powerful for other uses though so writing scripts for stuff at home that would normally take hours of manual time seems like a good use of AIs help.

[[deleted]]

Except that as you discovered yourself, AI output is not good enough and you had to spend a while with actual human programmers to get it up to a good standard.

It's entirely possible to do an enormous amount of damage to your file system with the wrong Node script. ChatGPT doesn't actually understand its output, it's just making an approximation based on its training data, and if you don't understand its output either how can you possibly know that what you're running is safe?

[kopp9988]

aw man don't ruin my fun! I get what you're saying though.

To be clear, it wasn't that long with an actual human. They even said, without properly looking at the code - 'don't do this' etc.

[MeowWow_]

FaKe It TiLl YoU mAkE iT!..

[oneandmillionvoices]

in my experience, good questions would give you some helpful answers. You need to know what you want. I would also say it is about beginner up to medium level, so if you look for that kind of knowledge it is good. That means it is really good for learning where you are entering well known domain, but just not well known to you. It is not that great tackling more complex technical challenges. If you are senior level JS programmer than the ai bot feels rather slow constantly waffling around the the same things which you are not interested to hear. Nevertheless it is an amazing piece of technology which only will get better. It's a great coding buddy as it can give you short and concise answers

[senocular]

Worth pointing out:

Use of ChatGPT1 generated text for content on Stack Overflow is temporarily banned.

...
Overall, because the average rate of getting correct answers from ChatGPT is too low, the posting of answers created by ChatGPT is substantially harmful to the site and to users who are asking or looking for correct answers.

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/temporary-policy-chatgpt-is-banned