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by pc86 1093 days ago
This is the big one, for me personally at least. I spend most of my time writing C# and Vue. When I need to write Python, or React, or Go, which happens from time to time, it will take me 10 minutes of back-and-forth with ChatGPT instead of an hour, or multiple hours, looking up tutorials and just figuring out what I even need to Google to find what I'm looking for.

I've tried using ChatGPT for my strengths and sometimes it helps for minutiae but for the most part it's faster for me just to write the code.
1 comments
throwawayadvsec 1093 days ago
I mean even for stuff I know really well it can help

you just have to get used to the way it "thinks" and how it "understand" your request, to write better prompts, you can even manage to send it half incomplete sentences if you really know what matters to it if you want to save even more time

and of course if someone won't start using it regularly they'll never reach a point where it's faster to just ask it for a function or a script than to write it

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DeconBlue 1092 days ago
In these kinds of sessions are you using a ChatGPT-X tool or something like GitHub Co-Pilot. I haven't started using these tools, but it does sound like there might be a significant benefit in some use cases.

I guess I am a little biased against the AI tools also as I've made a successful 34 year career in software development without using those tools, but I'm also aware that overnight, the world can change.

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throwawayadvsec 1092 days ago
I use both(ChatGPT 3.5 or 4 and Copilot), they complete each other IMO.(I also tried Chat Copilot which is awful and offers the worst of both worlds)

Copilot efficiency is directly linked to the readability of your code and the quality of your comments, so if you have a messy file, it can be better to ask ChatGPT in natural language, it's also better to use ChatGPT if important code related to what you're writing is spread across a lot of files because Copilot won't necessarily take everything into account.

On the other hand Copilot is better for one-liners, small functions, boilerplate, while ChatGPT can often do more complex stuff on the first try if your prompt is good enough and you don't need it to call something created after 2021, it can also sometimes be useful for debugging.

I'd say I autocomplete line or functions a few dozen times per hours with Copilot, and ask ChatGPT a question or two every hour.

There is also one thing to take into account, if you've been a professional for 34 years, it seems likely that you don't work with the latest popular language or framework. Models from OpenAI are order of magnitude worse at other less popular languages than Python or JS because they had less training data for less popular/older languages.

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