[McNutty]

GPT or Copilot

Take this comment with a massive pinch of salt as I'm not a dev, just a sysadmin who does some scripting, and I've learned a ton already from asking ChatGPT to "refactor this function".

One of my colleagues had paid for Copilot out of his own pocket, and the guy went from having never touched Python to writing functional applications in a few weeks.

Note that the copilot doesn't help with anything non-code that you don't ask it. For example, I asked my colleague why he doesn't use venv, and it was because he'd never heard of it. He certainly isn't using version control either! On the other hand, his documentation is great because copilot helps write that as you go.

[Lyngbakr]

I'm curious how Copilot and ChatGPT affect learning. Do they help people develop a good understanding of coding by getting them moving quickly and teaching them good practices? Or do they just let folks patch together chunks of code that work as a whole although they don't really understand why? Or perhaps the reality is somewhere in between?

[McNutty]

Honestly I think it will be game changing for education (if people use it for learning). You get initial info from it then you say "simplify that further" or "expand on that". Like having a personal tutor who is a PhD in 1000 subjects,just answering all your dumb questions 24x7