My two use cases are project brainstorming and boilerplate code, which saves a lot of time for me. For example sometimes I find an interesting paper and want to try it out in Python. If they did not provide code that will take some time and trial and error to get it running. Or I just copy the whole paper into ChatGPT and get an initial script that sometimes even works with it’s first try. But that is not the point, I can do the last steps myself, it really is a time saver for me with regards to programming.
It’s really useful for programming. It’s not always right but it has good approaches and you can ask it to write tedious parts of your code like long switch statements. Most of my programming problems were solved because I just explained the problem like Rubber Duck Debugging.
Depends on what you mean by “programming”.
If you mean it like the neighboring comment, who is probably a mathematician or physicist who just needs to feed it a science paper and run some models to verify the premise, but doesn’t care about the code itself, it’s a good tool. They aren’t programmers and learning programming or using a programmer would only delay them.
If you’re a professional programmer however your whole point is to create the most efficient specifications for the computer to do things. You cannot convey 100% of the spec to something like GPT so inevitably some is lost, so the end result is not the most efficient (or doesn’t even cover everything you needed).
You can of course use it to get a head start but there are also boilerplate and templating tools and frameworks that cover the same purpose.
Unlike the physicist, the code you make is the whole point, and it’s based in your knowledge of the subject matter, and you can’t replace it with GPT. Also, using GPT in this manner stunts your professional growth and damages you long term.
It would be somewhat worth it if at least it accelerated some part of your work, and it can find its way into the tooling, but straight out replacing your brain with it ain’t it.
For writing actual code and designing software it’s more trouble than it’s worth, it produces half-assed code that needs fixing.
TLDR figure out ASAP if you really mean to be a programmer or some other type of specialist that only deals with programming incidentally.
I use it for programming questions.
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immediate replies so I don’t have to switch tasks while praying for an answer
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no suggestions that I just do the whole thing differently
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infinite patience
Don’t forget the other benefits of using AI for programming:
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It may make up shit that doesn’t exist or just give you wrong syntax
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It will give you the same wrong answer repeatedly until you get irritated and it hangs up on you
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Is way too goddamned excited while giving you shit answers until you run out of patience
I like using it for help, but goddamn do I want to throw my laptop out the window some days.
