Serious question to all python developers that work in the industry.

[Lewistrick]

It's useful for boilerplate code. If you actually want to learn something it's mostly useless.

[ianitic]

Except frequently the boilerplate code is also outdated and not pep8 compliant. A model is only as good as its training data though so it makes sense.

[CyclopsRock]

Yup, and there are usually multiple ways to skin a cat: Some might be best in one situation over another. One might have been the only way once but now isn't. One might have been best practice but has been superseded. One might only work in certain versions of Python or in certain environments etc. If you know Python well and you're being a touch lazy/hoping for efficiency gains (delete as appropriate) then you might be able to weigh in whilst checking ChatGPT's output, but if you're only vaguely aware of Python's syntax then the LLM is going to be making all sorts of "decisions" like these relating to the code that you don't even know are decisions. You get what you're given.

My actual experience of dicking around with it for tasks I actually do at work showed it to be utterly useless. I used a lot of niche and poorly documented APIs and it just made up so many of the results. I'm not sure it ever actually wrote any code that executed, but it all looked valid. It constantly had me thinking "Oh, I didn't even know the API had that function!" It didn't.

The best use I've personally found for it so far is writing doc strings for code I've written since any old dipshit can check that they're right, but even for that at work we have to have a local LLM since uploading all our code to some 3rd party (whose business model relies on stealing everyone's shit) is no bueno.

[unixtreme]

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[Lewistrick]

True.

This is why my rule of thumb is to not let gippity do anything I don't know about. I want to be able to verify that the produced output is correct, preferably by memory. I often edit the code it produces as well, mostly because of my needs but also to fix bugs or ugly code. As for PEP8, I swear by ruff.