[matsemann]

I'm a senior dev. Which means my knowledge and experience is often on higher level stuff. Hence I often need to look up details I don't bother to remember. I'm not ashamed to say I search for lots of stuff, and often get results from SO.

If anything, pretending to be completely knowledgeable "since one's a senior" is quite junior behavior.

[arp242]

Also: sometimes I need to work with stuff I'm not so familiar with; no one is "senior" across the board. Even though I did Ruby full-time for a few years, it's been a while and I forgot a lot of basic boring stuff so I will end up searching things like "Ruby remove whitespace from string" (trim? strip? chop? chomp? delete? What were the differences again?)

And even inside my main expertise, I will sometimes search for an answer just to verify that my thinking is correct and that I didn't miss anything (which is not a strong guarantee that I didn't, but better than nothing).

[golergka]

That's where GPT-4 ate their lunch. I've never really administered servers myself before, but I was able to set up multi-container CI/CD on bare servers and monitoring with ELK, filebeat and metricbeat and public-faced services through nginx with SSL certificates and basic password authentication all in a single day.

Before, I would use stack overflow and it would take me at least a week.

[scarface_74]

I work in cloud consulting and I had a project where I needed to create a CI/CD proof of concept for the customer to use that involved deploying a Docker container to ECS (AWS’s Docker orchestrator) and show how they could integrate automated testing with the pipeline.

They use Java - a language I literally haven’t used since maybe a year after it was introduced.

I used ChatGPT to create the source code for the sample based on my specifications including Junit tests, the build with Maven, the Dockerfile - everything.

Of course it got a few things wrong and missed steps and I had to keep pasting in error messages until it got it right. But it was still faster than trolling the internet.

Of course I was very up front with the client that the Java pieces were all generated by ChatGPT.

[teh_klev]

> But it was still faster than trolling the internet.

I'm guessing you mean trawling the internet rather than trying to upset and annoy the internet:)

[JimDabell]

No, “trolling” is actually correct. It’s less widely used than the meaning you refer to these days though.

> the act of searching among a large number or many different places in order to find people or information you want

> It takes me 45 minutes of trolling on the internet and I’m still confused.

— https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/trolling

[teh_klev]

"Mainly US" though which explains a lot ;)

I see as well that the US English spelling for "trawl" (as in fishing) is troll. Again, mainly US.

[scarface_74]

Today I learned: while trawling is probably the word I should have used, I was unintentionally correct either way…

[scarface_74]

Even though the sibling comment said I was technically not wrong, I think “trawling” is the better term.

And I assume trawling vs trolling is one of those things that you feel the urge to point out just like I hate when someone says “jive” instead of “jibe”.

That last sentence was not meant to be passive aggressive at all. It was just an observation.

[teh_klev]

> That last sentence was not meant to be passive aggressive at all.

I certainly didn't read it that way. It just stood out because British English is my native language.

[luckystarr]

To each their own. I haven't had the necessity to use it, and when I searched for problems the answers were mostly not applicable. All in all it wasn't worth the effort. I just read the source code of the lib I use instead. This tends to give me more for my time.

I understand that everybody has their own unique situation and my statement wasn't meant to be generalized anyways.