AI used extremely sparingly is sometimes helpful to an experienced coder. “Multivac, generate a set of unit tests for this function.” Okay, some of these are dumb, but it’s easier getting started on this mess than just looking at a blank buffer. Helps get the juices flowing a bit. But man, you try to actually do anything with it, and suddenly you’re lost chasing a will-o’-wisp.
Oh man, I love ChatGPT for one thing in particular: “Hey chatbot, is there some library or standard library function for that very specific, yet still kinda generic thing I’m trying to do, so that I don’t have to write it myself?”
It does frequently give a helpful answer. That is, it doesn’t give me working code, but a helpful pointer to some manual where I can find good instructions for how to use the thing to solve my problem.
True that. But I often find that the search engine is not very good at giving me a solution if I don’t know the name of a problem and only have my spaghetti thoughts on what the thing is supposed to do, and translating spaghetti thoughts into something a search engine can find is where the chatbot excels.
Part of your trouble there is that Google is absolute dog shit these days. It used to be like magic; simple search terms would find you exactly what you were looking for in the first handful of results. Now you’re lucky to find it on the second page.
AI used extremely sparingly is sometimes helpful to an experienced coder. “Multivac, generate a set of unit tests for this function.” Okay, some of these are dumb, but it’s easier getting started on this mess than just looking at a blank buffer. Helps get the juices flowing a bit. But man, you try to actually do anything with it, and suddenly you’re lost chasing a will-o’-wisp.
Oh man, I love ChatGPT for one thing in particular: “Hey chatbot, is there some library or standard library function for that very specific, yet still kinda generic thing I’m trying to do, so that I don’t have to write it myself?”
It does frequently give a helpful answer. That is, it doesn’t give me working code, but a helpful pointer to some manual where I can find good instructions for how to use the thing to solve my problem.
I will usually google that kind of thing first (to save the rainforests)… Often I can find something that way, otherwise I might try an LLM
True that. But I often find that the search engine is not very good at giving me a solution if I don’t know the name of a problem and only have my spaghetti thoughts on what the thing is supposed to do, and translating spaghetti thoughts into something a search engine can find is where the chatbot excels.
Part of your trouble there is that Google is absolute dog shit these days. It used to be like magic; simple search terms would find you exactly what you were looking for in the first handful of results. Now you’re lucky to find it on the second page.