this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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Programmer Humor

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Today we have chatbots. Yesterday we had search engines and stack overflow. Before that we had books. And before that? Well what do you know... software programming is a relatively novel field. It's almost as if nobody has perfected how it should be learned.

The most valuable knowledge comes from experience. I copied plenty of code around during my learning days as well, and I still do it today. The most important part however is trying to understand the code you're working with. If you can understand it, know when it fails, test it in the right way, etc., then sure, you could probably learn to code from chatbots. They provide the information, and you're at liberty to do what you want with it. If you just copy it and forget, you'll be a bad programmer. But it's not like you couldn't do that before either with the other sources that were available - there were plenty of bad programmers before we had these tools available too.

That said, there is a risk that these chatbots do not provide any useful context around the code that they produce. When you learned from a book or stack overflow, you were reading from a reasonably authoritative source that could explain the code that was produced. But the authority behind the code from chatbots is probably much weaker than what we have from stack overflow, which in turn was probably also weaker than what we have from books. Does it have an effect or learning? I have no clue. But I still think you can learn from chatbots if you use the output that they provide in the right way. (Disclaimer: I have never used one of them and have no experience with them.)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As someone who is learning, I think it's imperative to understand that chatgpt has limitations that cannot be overlooked. It's pretty good if I make some silly syntax or formatting errors, but at the core I have to understand what I'm working with if I want to be a better programmer. I love the conversational nature because I often have a hard time wording questions, so it helps me in that regard as well. Idk if you want to be truly good at something you have to be more reliant on yourself than external tools.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The thing is, in some fields like devops, there are so many tools that you can't remember or know all of them very well. So asking chatgpt how to do something saves very much time. It can write ansible playbooks, docker files, web server configurations etc etc. They almost never work perfectly but they give a very good starting point to modify.

It used to be that you could be very good at specific languages or tools but today, there isn't enough time. Everyone is always in a hurry to get something out as quickly as possible too.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

ChatGPT was never made for programming and is horrible at generating code. It is nice for a peer-programming kinda setup tho, because it can quickly point you towards tools, libraries, APIs etc. to use

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It generated a custom needs GUI OCR tool in Qt5. I don't know a single bit of Qt5 and went from zero to working tool in half an hour.

The tool takes a screenshot, lets me select an area on the screen, OCRs it and displays the text in a window.

If ChatGPT isn't made for programming then I'm looking forward for a product that is.

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

I cant use chatgpt with godot :(

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