[godelski]

The thing I find them best for is fuzzy searching. When you'd have a hard time googling something, you ask the LLM. The answer you get back might also be fuzzy, but often that can be defuzzed and then correctly googled or resourced. In this way it is highly effective. But that is reducing the amount of time searching for information.

People that are 5-10x more effective at hard skills like programming, well I'm just convinced they weren't a good programmer to begin with and are doing easy problems. Basically, anyone that says that is telling on themselves.

[TeMPOraL]

I do get a big boost from GPT-4 in some areas, for a different reason - it's a great and versatile tool for overcoming random mental and emotional barriers.

There are plenty of tasks I'd normally procrastinate on, or be reluctant to do, because they're tiring, boring, or emotionally difficult for reasons specific to myself. That is, cases when I have the knowledge and the skills, but lack the willpower or composture (or glucose / caffeine in my bloodstream). Using GPT-4 for with that kind of work isn't saving much time vs. what I could do, but it is compared to what would actually happen, which is either me procrastinating on it, delaying it for a better time (next morning, day with less meetings, etc.), or suffering a 2-10x performance penalty from having to fight through my own emotional blocks.

On the net, this isn't making me 5-10x more effective at work. It's probably not even 2x, short-term. Mid-term, 2-5x would be possible, because all the things I did earlier than later add up. Time will tell.

Am I telling on myself here? Maybe. Sorry not sorry. I am a human being, with a human brain, which means some things that should be easy for me, become hard for unrelated reasons. GPT-4 is one of many tools I have to overcome such challenges, but it's a particularly powerful and versatile one, so I'm happy that I can use it.

(Also, INB4, I have access to company-approved deployment on Azure, so I'm in the clear with using it at work.)

[ambyra]

Ye, sometimes I don't have enough energy to research how to implement something that day, so I'd put it off till I had the energy. Instead, gpt generates the code, and I just have to debug/test it.

[godelski]

I guess I'm a bit confused at what you're saying. Are you asking it to explain things to you in a pirate voice so that it is more entertaining and you can maintain concentration? I don't find this as really relying on GPT. Or are you saying when you have simple routines that need to be implemented but are boring and so you have GPT generate most of them for you to reduce the bordem? I also don't see that as contentious with what I said above (all programming has a lot of boring and routine shit).

But if you're outsourcing a significant portion of your overall work (day-to-day, not just off-days) then that's more what I'm getting at. The people that are like "I couldn't imagine programming without copilot" or such. Every one of those that I've met is missing important base knowledge about programming in general that ends up making a lot of technical debt for themselves. The "build fast and break things" style realistically only works if you have a certain level of expertise OR the project doesn't need to be robust. Former because to actually be fast you need to have a good picture of the whole or else you end up chasing one thing to the next and your overall path is far slower but might seem faster because you're sprinting the whole time.

[hackerlight]

> People that are 5-10x more effective at hard skills like programming, well I'm just convinced they weren't a good programmer to begin with and are doing easy problems.

It can make devs 5-10x more effective at certain self-contained programming tasks, even if they aren't 5-10x more effective at their job overall. If you have to write a script in a language you haven't used before and it needs to interface with an API whose documentation you haven't read, and the script isn't mission critical but a "nice to have", GPT can massively shorten the learning curve required to just get this work done. Being a good dev doesn't excuse you from having to pay the cost of learning the syntax of this language and basics of the documentation more thoroughly than if you didn't have GPT.

[bluepod4]

> Basically, anyone that says that is telling on themselves.

Similar to anyone who says, “When you'd have a hard time googling something, you ask the LLM.”

Just my opinion.

[godelski]

If you really don't feel like fuzzy searching is a thing, then I have to say that I'm delighted to meet an omniscient being. I wish I was at your level where I could know about abstract mathematical concepts that have not been mentioned in many of the vast books I have read or finding out if specific concepts outside my fiend of study have specific names associated with them as well. I'm trying to learn a lot and to get to your level, but I don't know a better way that sifting through the fuzziness. Sometimes I google and google and just noting turns up because terms are overloaded and the other thing comes up far more since they are far more popular. Maybe you can help? Teach me these google-fu.

[bluepod4]

If you can give a specific example where you had trouble Googling for something, then I can try to help.

[monkeydust]

Similar experience, agents or tools as part of LLM framework can help 'defuzzing'.

[melagonster]

some people are not programmer butneed to write small script in work or even just finding a Excel function.

[godelski]

No one is complaining about these people using LLMs. Nor even grabbing simple routines. We're discussing people who write code with LLMs, as in the whole process. Whole programs. By people who are professional SWEs. Non-programmers and simple routines are out of scope. No one is saying "never use LLMs", just that they aren't going to replace programmers anytime soon.