[insanitybit]

Sure. I'm way more productive with Copilot. I haven't been coding much lately but I could imagine it would double my productivity with regards to the actual "get an implementation of a thing done" bit of the work.

In terms of design, I had a long conversation with ChatGPT the other day about designing a database, including optimizations that could be made given certain requirements and constraints, etc. It was a big productivity boost, like rubber ducking on steroids.

[valenterry]

I tried it to help me optimize some sql, but even after many attempts it didn't really do anything useful for me. The best thing was really to show how the syntax works for features that I rarely use - so in that sense it's a better stackoverflow.

[BonoboIO]

Can you give us an example how it helped to design the database?

I could not think how it would have helped me, but maybe I m limited in my imagination or don’t know how to ask.

[insanitybit]

I told it I was designing a database. I told it that my database could tolerate failure levels where more than a quorum of nodes failed at a given time. I then asked it about different algorithms for consensus; RAFT, Paxos, swarm based, etc. It described algorithms for me. I told it that in my database I could guarantee certain things, like that every operation commutes, and I asked how that would let me optimize things - it explained that I could paralellize certain parts of those algorithms.

At one point I told it to name the algorithm we had been discussing something like "OptSwim" and we just kept iterating on the idea.

[rossvor]

But aren't you afraid that whenever you veer discussion from Wikipedia/stackoverflow type explanations it's likely lying to you? This was my general experience -- it's great at querying for stuff which already exists and is popular on the internet and for conversing on a surface level or broad level but as soon you delve into details it starts confidently lying and/or hallucinating things, which undermines my trust in it, which in turn means I need to verify what it says, which means it did not increase my productivity that much after all.

It routinely invents arguments, functions or concepts which don't exist in reality or don't apply to the current context, but look like they could, so you are even more likely to get caught by this.

[Slartie]

Haha, yes, it indeed invents arguments that aren't part of specific APIs and would offer to do something that you'd like to do in a very easy way, but since they actually aren't part of the API, well, you're out of luck.

It's just taking the "I wish they'd thought of my use case when designing that API" on the next level by simply pretending in a very sincere and convincing way that your wish came true, then writing a usually-pretty-correct program around that assumption that would actually work _if that wish had come true_ - but unfortunately that API doesn't really accept this convenient parameter, so...it's not that easy in reality.

[dboreham]

Well then. The singularity is here. Almost no humans understand these things.

[merlincorey]

I think people may be downvoting you because technically, neither does the AI.