Comment by spacechild1
5 days ago
I'm having a very good experience with ChatGPT at the moment. I'm mostly using it for little tasks where I don't remember the exact library functions. Examples:
"C++ question: how do I get the unqualified local system time and turn into an ISO time string?"
"Python question: how do I serialize a C struct over a TCP socket with asyncio?"
"JS question: how do I dynamically show/hide an HTML element?" (I obviously don't write a lot of JS :-D)
ChatGPT gave me the correct answers on the first try. I have been a sceptic, but I'm now totally sold on AI assisted coding, at least as a replacement for Google and StackOverflow. For me there is no point anymore in wading through all the blog spam and SEO crap just to find a piece of information. Stack Overflow is still occasionally useful, but the writing is on the wall...
EDIT: Important caveat: stay critical! I have been playing around asking ChatGPT more complex questions where I actually know the correct answer resp. where I can immediately spot mistakes. It sometimes gives me answers that would look correct to a non-expert, but are hilariously wrong.
The problem with this approach is that you might lose important context which is present in the documentation but doesn’t surface through the LLM. As an example, I just asked GPT-4o how to access Nth character in a string in Go. Predictably, it answered str[n]. This is a wildly dangerous suggestion because it works correctly for ASCII but not for other UTF8 characters. Sure, if you know about this and prompt it further it tells you about this limitation, but that’s not what 99% of people will do.
> The problem with this approach is that you might lose important context which is present in the documentation but doesn’t surface through the LLM.
Oh, I'm definitely aware of that! I mostly do this with things I have already done, but can't remember all the details. If the LLM shows me something new, I check the official documentation. I'm not into vibe coding :) I still want to understand every line of code I write.