Do chatgpt or other language models help you code more efficiently and faster? Is it worth spending your money for it?
Mostly as a search engine. I have it set up to only respond with answers it has web sources for. Code completion like Copilot can be useful, however 90% of the completions aren’t really saving me any time, the other 10% are awesome though.
So I could easily drop copilot but ChatGPT or HuggingChat used like search engines are awesome.
The chatbot version? Meh, sometimes, but I don’t use it often.
The IDE integrated autocompletion?
I’ll stab the MFer that tries to take that away.
So much time saved for things that used to just be the boring busywork parts of coding.
And while it doesn’t happen often, the times it preempts my own thinking for what to do next is magic feeling.
I often use the productivity hack of leaving a comment for what I’m doing next when I start my next day, and it’s very cool when I sit down to start work and see a completion that’s 80% there. Much faster to get back into the flow.
I will note that I use it in a mature codebase, so it matches my own style and conventions. I haven’t really used it in fresh projects.
Also AMAZING when working with popular APIs or libraries I’m adding in for the first time.
Edit: I should also note that I have over a decade of experience, so when it gets things wrong it’s fairly obvious and easily fixed. I can’t speak to how useful or harmful it would be as a junior dev. I will say that sometimes when it is wrong it’s because it is trying to follow a more standard form of a naming convention in my code vs an exception, and I have even ended up with some productive refractors prompted by its mistakes.
As someone who is just getting started in a new language (rust), it can be very helpful when trying to figure out why something doesn’t work, or maybe some tips I don’t know (even if gets confused sometimes).
However, for my regular languages and work, I imagine it would be a lot slower.
I’m pretty sure even if it was helpful they wouldn’t use it out of principle. Shit’s basically plagiarism laundering.
EDIT: Oh you’re talking about devs who use Lemmy, not the Lemmy devs.
Absolutely. I just built a little proof of concept thing where I loaded some GIS data into a google map to display the major rivers of the world.
ChatGPT, the v4 that I pay $20/mo for, was like someone with deep knowledge of all the technologies and APIs involved.
I’m gonna post a link to screenshots of the convo so you can see exactly how it went.
Not the whole thing because it’s longer than I remember.
But just consider how long it would have taken me to answer each of those questions just by googling and reading old forums and stack overflow posts.
Much like sitting next to someone with experience, a question that could take me hours to answer on the internet took me only seconds to answer by asking directly. GPT’s responses are still long, so it’s not pure conversational style, but the longer responses aren’t wasted fluff. It’s all relevant to what I asked.
Natural language as a way to query a knowledge base is enormously useful. Especially for something that requires update of existing knowledge as often as tech work.
Yes, by far the most useful thing is stuff like API and keyword documentation for poorly documented code. Its literally the promise of self generating docs for tedious shit.
And it’s docs that form themselves around a specific question! It’s incredible!
It helps me write emails that are less nerdy.
ChatGPT will mock up a python script pretty quickly given a basic english description and reference materials like API docs, sparing me the burden of doing something tedius, but that’s about the extent of its utility for me.
I’m no real dev, but yes.
Even the free version is helpful.
I’m a new DM (and new to TTRPGs in general). I’m using bard and chatgpt to keep track of homebrew stuff.
I’m running an almost completely custom system, adapted to ASOIAF. Races (renamed to origins), classes, backgrounds, feats, etc. extra mechanics like duelling systems and large battle simulations, and faction interaction systems. It’s a lot, and I find it easier for me to have the bot spray solutions to whatever issue I run into, then grab the one that might work, and refine it until it might sound fun. I need to get a system in order to keep track of my campaign, though. Tried WorldAnvil and honestly, I don’t need that many tools. Might go back to Notion and keep track of all the factions and characters that way. Gonna be a lot of work though.
I mostly use shell-gpt and ask it trivial questions. Saves me the time for switching to a browser. I have it always running in a tmux pane. As for code, I found it helpful for getting started when writing a functionality, but the actual engineering part should be done manually imo. As for spending money on it, depends on how you benifit from it. I spend about 50c on my openai API key, but I know a friend who used ollama (I think with some mistral derivative) locally on a gaming laptop with decent enough results.
Yes, it’s extremely powerful. For example I recently had an idea for a script to merge cbz files into a single document so I wouldn’t have to clutter my ereader with many individual chapters. The LLM had almost no issue writing the whole thing with only one revision, spent less time and thought on that than I did googling around to see if there were existing solutions. It’s really nice being able to create programs like that just on the high level concept and without mentally getting into the weeds of implementation details. If I wrote it myself I would have had to refresh my memory on stuff like regex and sorting syntax and it would have been way more time and effort. It basically lets me write custom scripts for any trivial problem where they could be useful where otherwise it might be too much trouble.
