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by milani 1051 days ago
For smaller pieces, you are right. But as a BE engineer, I was prototyping a concept and I didn't know much about Typescript+React+React-Router-Dom+React-Hooks-Form, etc etc. So I listed the libraries, a few lines of boilerplate and API definitions that RTK toolkit generated for me. Then asked GPT to generate the full page. It was much faster than I could "code it myself".

And that's why it is a "pain point". These all can be done automatically.
1 comments
Aperocky 1051 days ago
If you ever need to extend that full page to do something else or something additional you might find the time not so different after all. Because you still don't know much about Typescript+React+React-Router-Dom+React-Hooks-Form and now you have to read that stuff and try to make sense of it, even if just for passing it back into the bot.

Actually writing code is a minority of my time spent developing software, I don't need to trade that for need to spend time to know what and more importantly why something is where it is.

I guess it does work if you just want it to generate a webpage and you never want to then add any functionality. Or a glorified boilerplate generator for stuff not on the prod path.

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milani 1051 days ago
> I don't need to trade that for need to spend time to know what and more importantly why something is where it is.

I had two options: 1. Learn everything first and then start prototyping. 2. Start prototyping and learn along the way. I chose the latter. But instead of searching stackoverflow and putting the pieces together, I used GPT and learned from the generated outputs in the context of my own problem.

It may not save a lot of time in larger projects because as you said, one should ultimately learn the "what and why", but it definitely provides a more pleasing experience. And I guess the time-saving part becomes more relevant with better tooling, like the suggestion I had.

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Aperocky 1050 days ago
Fair - I guess I'm just used to the old ways and hated things showing up without me specifically telling them to show up there first. But then, I still learn while prototyping, ChatGPT might be easier since it does give you a template to go off of.

But then, I don't think this really go beyond entry level prototyping, any complexity and chatGPT doesn't have enough tokens.

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