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by CHY872 766 days ago
Yes, if you take a problem you don't understand, ask a GPT to write a solution, do nothing to check the solution, trust it blindly, and then use the solution for some safety critical problem, you're playing with fire. But there's a spectrum, and please don't assume I'm at that end of it.

Lots of the time you understand the problem, but the problem is repetitive. Parsing a weird file format might well be that. Beyond that, you have solutions that are easily checked. For example, if I ask ChatGPT to optimise an algorithm for a certain CPU cache, I can easily read whether it did that. And then, there are parts of a software job that are crucial and subtle, and parts that are not.

As a practitioner, traditionally that leads to a shift in the focus and speed with which you approach a task - some pieces of code are 100 lines that took you 2 weeks to get to and were hard fought, some are 2000 lines which you wrote in a day.

Lastly, so much of solid software is being able to understand a probably unfamiliar domain, and ChatGPT can be a great buddy in terms of gaining problem context, finding the limits of your own understanding.

I don't use co-pilot like things, but I've found ChatGPT to be a massive enabler in terms of being able to be productive in unfamiliar problem-spaces.