We need a comparison against an average coder. Some fucking baseline ffs.
“Self driving cars will make the roads safer. They won’t be drunk or tired or make a mistake.”
Self driving cars start killing people.
“Yeah but how do they compare to the average human driver?”
Goal post moving.
Why would we compare it against an average coder?
ChatGPT wants to be a coding aid/reference material. A better baseline would be the top rated answer for the question on stackoverflow or whether the answer exists on the first 3 Google search results.
We need a comparison against an average coder. Some fucking baseline ffs.
Sure, but by randomly guessing code you’d get 0%. Getting 48% right is actually very impressive for an LLM compared to just a few years ago.
Exactly, I also find that it tends to do a pretty good job pointing you in the right direction. It’s way faster than googling or going through sites like stackoverflow because the answers are contextual. You can ask about a specific thing you want to do, and and an answer that gives you a general idea of what to do. For example, I’ve found it to be great for crafting complex sql queries. I don’t really care if the answer is perfect, as long as it gives me an idea of what I need to do.
You can also play with it to try and get closer to correct. I had problems with getting an Excel macro working and getting unattended-updates working on my pihole. GPT was wrong at first, but got me partly there and I could massage the question and Google and get closer to the right answer. Without it, I wouldn’t have been able to get any of it, especially with the macro.
Just useful enough to become incredibly dangerous to anyone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. Isn’t it great?
Now non-coders can finally wield the foot-gun once reserved only for coders! /s
Truth be told, computer engineering should really be something that one needs a licence to do commercially, just like regular engineering. In this modern era where software can be ruinous to someone’s life just like shoddy engineering, why is it not like this already.
Look, nothing will blow up if I mess up my proxy setup on my machine. I just won’t have internet until I revert my change. Why would that be different if I were getting paid for it?
It’s programming spell check
In the short term it really helps productivity, but in the end the reward for working faster is more work. Just doing the hard parts all day is going to burn developers out.
I program for a living and I think of it more as doing the interesting tasks all day, rather than the mundane and repetitive. Chat GPT and GitHub Copilot are great for getting something roughly right that you can tweak to work the way you want.
I think we must change the way we see AI. A lot of people see it as the holy grail of everything that can do everything we can do, even tho it can’t. AI is a tool for humans to become more efficient in their work. It can do easy tasks for you and sometimes Assist you with harder stuff. It is the same as with Mathematicians and calculators. A good mathematician is able to calculate everytheverything he needs without a calculator, but the calculator makes him much more efficient at calculating stuff. The calculator didn’t replace mathematicians, because you still have to know how to do the stiff you’re doing.