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by peterangular 1149 days ago
In good faith I really don't know what you're arguing for.

If you re-read our conversation I express that simple snippets of code from ChatGPT have been accurate enough, ultimately saving me time (paraphrasing). You then push back on me with the following:

> The thing is - how often do you end up needing such snippets? How much more useful is receiving it from ChatGPT than looking it up in a search engine?

> [...] but the overall benefit seems negligible, especially when you need to watch out at every step for convincingly-looking nonsense

I doubled down, doing my best to elaborate where it has added value to my workflow, when it breaks down for me, and addressed specific concerns in your comments. When you say "overall benefit seems negligible" - I read that very clearly as overall the benefit (of ChatGPT) seems negligible (regarding the context of our conversation). That context to me was that ChatGPT helps me with simple snippets and POCs. I did my best to politely rebut that with my personal and professional experiences regarding the tool.

Now you say:

> its main value comes from my ADHD mind not being able to focus on boring stuff I already know how to do - in those cases, GPT gets me the boilerplate I can start operating on right away, which sure is helpful

This is directly compatible and agreeing with what I feel I have been advocating for since my first message in this conversation - that using ChatGPT for simple boilerplate code can be valid (paraphrasing). But, I feel like this is contradictory to, and in conflict with what you previously said: "the overall benefit seems negligible".

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Overall this conversation seems to contradict itself, and with that it's confusing and frustrating to me. Sorry.

Cheers

1 comments

> that using ChatGPT for simple boilerplate code can be valid

I don't disagree. I just don't see it as "incredibly valuable", it's way too erratic for that. When it works well it does help, but it works well in such a small minority of software developer's tasks that its impact is pretty much negligible overall - and what I meant to point out is that this is an opinion coming from someone who does find it useful in certain cases.

It makes it a bit easier for me to not get distracted by my web browser, sometimes. It does not change my quality of life as a programmer at all. It would be probably more valuable to delegate these tasks to a junior dev in my team if it had one - the junior would learn from that experience and get closer to becoming a senior, ChatGPT won't.

> I don't disagree. I just don't see it as "incredibly valuable"

Lol - that is by definition disagreeing with the first sentence that I said in our conversation. You disagree that it is "incredibly valuable" and have spent every comment saying that the overall impact of ChatGPT for developers is "negligible overall."

You do disagree with me... and that's OK =)

Have you read what you're replying to? I said that I don't disagree "that using ChatGPT for simple boilerplate code can be valid". It's a completely different thing than what you're implying.

We're commenting under an article that talks about how ChatGPT supposedly makes most of human's skills worthless. Similar sentiment can be seen in many places when it comes to programming. It can't do that if all it helps with are some trivial snippets sometimes. It's helpful for getting boilerplate going, but getting help with boilerplate has negligible effect on programmer's work.

> Have you read what you're replying to?

Yes. I find it sorta offensive that you assume otherwise.

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Let's boil this down. I said "the boilerplate ChatGPT provides me is incredibly valuable," and further elaborated that using the tool is "valid."

You disagree with "incredibly valuable" but "don't disagree" with the tool being "valid."

So - I'm saying. We disagree that boilerplate output from ChatGPT is "incredibly valuable" and frankly that's just gonna be subjective regardless. Let's agree to disagree here. I just find it funny that you say "I don't disagree" then outright disagree with the exact language I used in the first sentence of our conversation regarding the value of this tool.

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> We're commenting under an article that talks about how ChatGPT supposedly makes most of human's skills worthless. Similar sentiment can be seen in many places when it comes to programming. It can't do that if all it helps with are some trivial snippets sometimes.

And honestly I feel like this is why our communication and conversation is frustrated here. I don't see our conversation as being a proxy for the infinitely complex and complicated "making human skills worthless" conversation... personally, I just wanted to say "I use this tool for X, and personally have found great value in it."