Comment by what-the-grump
2 years ago
It doesn’t matter? It’s a tool, you need to learn how to use it, understand its limitations.
I used chatgpt today to save minutes of my life having it rewrite code from one language to another. Could I have googled the syntax of both, remember how, why , etc. transcribed it to another language, sure. Chat gpt did this in seconds.
I've found it particularly good at translating from one language to another. It will even recognize limitations and dependencies. For example, I asked it to translate some Javascript code (with a UI) into Julia. It said something to the effect of "You can't manipulate the DOM directly in Julia, but we can use GTK.jl to create a GUI". The resulting code needed some work (I'd be surprised if it didn't) but for the most part the structure was there and it provided a pretty decent frame on which to build.
FWIW I made a CLI utility that does this, it saves a bit typing / copy-pasting. More languages can be added easily: https://github.com/clevercli/clevercli#built-in-prompts
For some types of code.
We translated a short bash script into windows .bat files and PowerShell.
It was so wrong with the .bat files that there wasn't a single working line in the entire script. It was 99% correct with the PowerShell code.
As a tool it is completely unreliable. But it does look like magic when it works.
No offense, but I don't think .bat files are that popular, which means ChatGPT did not see enough of them to really learn them enough.
Try asking for some Bash or Python instead and compare the results.
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