this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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[–] [email protected] 148 points 1 year ago (40 children)

For the love of God, if you're a junior programmer you're overestimating your understanding if you keep relying on chatGPT thinking 'of course I'll spot the errors'. You will until you won't and you end up dropping the company database or deleting everything in root.

All ChatGPT is doing is guessing the next word. And it's trained on a bunch of bullshit coding blogs that litter the internet, half of which are now chatGPT written (without any validation of course).

If you can't take 10 - 30 minutes to search for, read, and comprehend information on stack overflow or docs then programming (or problem solving) just isn't for you. The junior end of this feel is really getting clogged with people who want to get rich quick without doing any of the legwork behind learning how to be good at this job, and ChatGPT is really exarcebating the problem.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (28 children)

If you can’t take 10 - 30 minutes to search for, read, and comprehend information on stack overflow or docs

A lot of the time this is just looking for syntax though; you know what you want to do, and it's simple, but it is gated behind busywork. This is to me the most useful part about ChatGPT, it knows all the syntax and will write it out for you and answer clarifying questions so you can remain in a mental state of thinking about the actual problem instead of digging through piles of junk for a bit of information.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (4 children)

you can remain in a mental state of thinking about the actual problem

more like you'll end up wasting a significant amount of time debugging not only the problem, but also chatGPT, trying to correct the bullshit it spews out, often ignoring parts of your prompt

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That hasn't been my experience. How are you trying to use it?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It might be wrong even if you provide extensive context to make it more accurate in it's heuristics. And providing extensive context is pretty time consuming at times.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I think it would help me organize my thoughts to write that all out anyway even without a LLM.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I mean it might be good at helping you when you're stuck, but sometimes it misses simple issues such as typos and for one issue resolved, it might introduce another if you're not careful.

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