[__mp]

When writing a small application in Go I had great success asking Chat GPT specific questions. It helped me figure out which packages I needed to use and how to interact with them.

I understand that this might not fit your use-case, but it's worth a try. Just be aware that it tends to hallucinate APIs.

[bidandanswer]

If it does hallucinate, you can just paste it the latest documentation and the hallucination rate goes to nearly zero.

[reactordev]

Or it apologizes profusely, tells you you’re correct, and fails to fix its reasoning or the examples it gives you.

[xtracto]

A couple of days ago I was trying to make Chatgpt give me the equivalent s3:// string for an https://... s3 bucket. The stupid thing would just replace http with s3, no matter how much I told it what I wanted (I needed to reformat several links, and search engines were just giving me s3 -> http scripts).

It finally landed on me that I was using gpt3.5 . Once I moved to gpt4 it got it right the first time.

[davidw]

I was trying to get it to write some Elixir code to handle Erlang B calculations and it just couldn't figure it out, but it was pretty confident with the wrong things it was printing out.

[bidandanswer]

The rust borrow checker often requires too much critical thinking for ChatGPT, as well.

LLMs confer a tremendous productivity boost. You just have to understand their limits and know when it's faster to think through and write the solution yourself.

[fauigerzigerk]

I told it to stop apologising all the time. It apologised for doing that :)

[Zambyte]

Did you also try telling it what it should do instead?

[fauigerzigerk]

No, because there is nothing I wanted it to do instead. Perhaps what I should have done was to change the system prompt to something like "You are a helpful assistant that will admit its mistakes but never apologise for them."

[Zambyte]

> because there is nothing I wanted it to do instead.

"Simply do not say anything and move on" is something to do instead.

[ZeroClickOk]

probably chatgpt is Canadian :)

[block_dagger]

Sounds like you need to add some custom instructions to get the tone, accuracy, and concision you want.

[JimBlackwood]

Does it actually consume the documentation? You could (haven’t tried in a while) also have ChatGPT tell you anything you wanted aslong as you stated “It’s been posted on Wikipedia after your last consumed date”.

I feel like telling it that it’s wrong and linking documentation is the same as referring to Wikipedia?

[dpflan]

I mean you can just run the code and verify its functionality, right? I guess you could be in trouble if you get functioning hallucinations and try to build more around a false foundation.

[justin66]

The person asking the question seems to be looking for a course or textbook with which to challenge themselves.

What you've described is the opposite of that.

[__mp]

I understand. But as a long-time programmer I like to explore new programming languages or APIs by working on a small project. I start with a first prototype to get the feel of the language, before I look into extended documentation. Chat GPT helps with this use-case.

It's also more fun to have something which can be easily extended than to start from scratch.

[adonese]

>Just be aware that it tends to hallucinate APIs.

It gives you nice little hints and a different perspective on your api design itself. I'd have a chat with chatgpt and sometimes I'd miss to share specific code and it just assumes or hallucinate on that.