[somecommit]

Less critical then yesterday because of ChatGPT, I always expected to become fluent in bash at some point, but the AI became too good at writing my scripts now...

Also you can use the chat as a learning tool, it's really a game changer for whom want to really learn it.

[gabrielgio]

What could go wrong? Use a technology that is notorious for outputting wrong information to write a script that is really hard to get it right and then later reviewed by someone that can’t really understand it.

At this point just use something else.

[dinkleberg]

You say that likes writing code doesn’t involve experimentation in general. You can’t trust the code that that Chatgpt gives you, but you also can’t trust the code that even you write until you test it. It is always an iterative process. Why does it matter that some use AI tools as a starting point?

[gabrielgio]

> Why does it matter that some use AI tools as a starting point?

I rather learn (or iterate) using a proper source of information (like a book, a blog post written by someone with actual knowledge, or even with a more experience coleague). At least for me it seems more productive.

[KolenCh]

Try pasting a piece of code you don't understand and ask LLM to explain it to you.

Then try the same and find a human to explain it to you.

Then compare the price (including money and time) and performance of both.

I won't believe you made an objective assessment if your conclusion is that either party is the best solution all the time. The point is right now the number of occasions that AI has better price performance is large enough for it to be generally useful.

[gabrielgio]

> I won't believe you made an objective assessment

Why even ask then?

I have tried to use chatGPT a couple of time and many of those times it was wrong, to a point that if I ever use again I'd definitely double check the output(which makes me not bother using it in the first place).

Cute that some people find it useful, I don't, it has no use for me in the state it is today.

[dizhn]

Either it gives you so much that you never learn anything of use from those iterations or it gives you too little that you might as well write it from scratch (and get better quickly).

[worksonmine]

You can do a lot of irreversible damage with the shell, if you're unsure of how a line will behave don't run it.

[ftaghn]

> I always expected to become fluent in bash at some point, but the AI became too good at writing my scripts now...

This page :

https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls

Is the fastest way of becoming proficient with shell scripting. Whether it's pure posix shell, or bash and its extensions, they're small languages and can be learned in a week end if you're proficient in another programming language. The main pain point is that there's a lot of "surprises" and non-intuitive behaviors, that are all listed here. The first ones, about parameter expansions, quoting variables and leading dashes are the most common issue with newbies in shell scripting.

There's a lot of amazing tooling these days to make sure your shell scripts are fine too. First, shellcheck:

https://www.shellcheck.net/

I systematically run this on my scripts before using them.

Then shfmt for nice, reliable autoformatting: https://github.com/mvdan/sh

And finally, checkbashisms if you intend on making pure posix scripts that are compatible with debian/ubuntu's dash. It is part of the debian's devscripts suite, but is often individually packaged in other distros.

> Also you can use the chat as a learning tool

Or you could learn from a guide written by people who have suffered decades of experience of the pitfalls of shell scripting and have shared their woes.

https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide

chatGPT is good at coming up with magical solutions, but teaching you about all the corner cases?

[BossingAround]

I think this is a trap for engineers inexperienced with Bash. You can (and should of course) use ChatGPT to be more productive in writing bash scripts, but as was said in the previous discussions, bash contains so many traps which you won't be able to spot.

Bash's dangers might be exacerbated by using ChatGPT, since you'll rely on the tool and you might not be able to understand what's wrong if shit hits the fan.

I'd recommend not using bash for anything other than the simplest tasks, as per Google's Shell style guide [0].

[0] https://google.github.io/styleguide/shellguide.html#s1.2-whe...

[jzb]

“Less critical then”

Than. Not “then,” than.

I point this out because I’m pretty sure lazy reliance on spellcheck and autocorrect are to blame with about half the internet using then when they should be using than.

I shudder to think what a few years of ChatGPT is going to do.

[somecommit]

I agree!

[youngNed]

as someone who is late to this party, can you tell me how you are using it? In an IDE? what sort of way are you using it to learn rather than just give answers? thx.

[somecommit]

Just use the website. You can explain (in english or even native language if relevant) your algorithm and for small functions it's giving you correct answer. You still need to concatenate them.

For learning in my case I needed to learn python and I'm already expert in javascript for example. So you can ask the prompt for the equivalent in python every time you feel stuck. But using the chat is so more precise and quick, than google for this kind of questions. Also without all the noise of google. In particular without this "noise" and time and concentration to find the response, it's a game changer when you really want to just learn and memorize.