[yodsanklai]

I'm a software engineer and I don't find much value in ChatGPT. It provides a bit of help when writing very specific and short pieces of code for languages I know but don't use often. I'd be curious to have actual data on how other SWEs use it.

[agg23]

I have privacy concerns with both ChatGPT and Copilot, but I also don't get the desire to use these tools on a daily basis. I am very adept at talking to a computer, and figuring out what it's doing/wants (though it may take a while). Trying to convince a language model to act as an inbetween for me just seems like a massive hassle.

It's like delegating work to a junior that is completely untrustworthy, but instead of you working to level up your junior and gain a useful coworker, you're forever stuck with the kind of dumb, needs simple things explained person.

I read posts like this and I wonder if I'm really missing out by not writing English paragraphs a lot of the time instead of code.

[DonsDiscountGas]

The type of question I used to type into google, now I ask ChatGPT. For a language I know well it tends to bring a 5 minute task down to 2 minutes. For a language I don't know well it takes a 30 minute task down to 2 minutes (One weird day the site for a framework was down and I couldn't read the docs, but ChatGPT was there with the right answer).

[porridgeraisin]

Yeah, and while it's true it can't really solve something you have to think about specific to your problem domain, I find it really good for common implementations. If I'm making a music app and I'm implementing shuffle, I just type

function fisherYates(arr: IPlaylistItem[]) { tab and it's done.

Similarly, I just type

  class SortedSet:
    // api has to have add, rank, cardinality, itemsinrange(make this a fluent api with min max fns returning self each time, and a get to resolve it, and items() to start it)
   // use redis

And it does the zrank, zcard zadd etc figuring out how to call the py-redis API.

Similarly I cba when learning an ORM to find out how specifically it does something by scouring it's docs, I just type SQL or natural language there or the beginnings of it atleast, and let copilot fill out the orm api for me. After which I can just hover over the functions it chained/nested together and the docs pop up and I verify that it did it right, and read any caveats they mention. I pretty much learnt how to use prisma just by seeing what copilot produced.

[gsuuon]

I plug it directly into my editor (via https://github.com/gsuuon/llm.nvim) and have it fill out code for me. I write what I want with comments and ask it to fill the rest - if it's straightforward enough it basically always works. I also get it to write commit messages (based on git diff) - though I need to improve my prompt a bit as it gets verbose and I end up rewriting it most of the time. I was working on trying to feed it things like hover and tree-sitter information before I got distracted, but that'd be another power boost as well whenever I get around to it.

[Zetice]

I used the hell out of copilot when plugged into vscode.

I became more of an editor, less of a coder.