New ask Hacker News story: Tell HN: To be honest.. GPT copilots aren't that great for programming
Tell HN: To be honest.. GPT copilots aren't that great for programming
52 by swman | 41 comments on Hacker News.
For context, I'm a experienced SWE working on some fairly complex things. I've been using programming GPT copilots for 6-8 months now and lately I've been using them less and less. I think for complete beginners or casual programmers, GPT might be mind-blowing and cool because it can create a for loop or recommend some solution to a common problem. However, for most of my tasks, it usually has ended up being a total waste of time and leads to frustration. Don't get me wrong, it is useful for those basic tasks for which in the past I'd do the google -> Stack Overflow route. However, for anything more complex, it falls flat. Just a recent example from last week - I was working on some dynamic SQL generation. To be fair, it was a really complex task and it was 5pm so I didn't feel like whiteboarding (when in doubt, always whiteboard and skip gpt lol). I thought I'd turn to GPT and ended up wasting 30 minutes while it kept hallucinating and giving me code that isn't even valid. It skipped some of the requirements and missed things like a GROUP BY which made the generated query not even work. When I told it that it missed this, it regenerated some totally different code that had other issues.. and I stopped. When chatGPT first came out I was using it all the time. Within a couple weeks though it became obvious it is really limited. I thought I'd wait a few months and maybe it would get better but it hasn't. Who exactly are copilots for if not beginners? I really don't find them that useful for programming because 80% of the time the solutions are a miss or worse don't even compile or work. I enjoy using it to write sci fi stories or learn more about some history stuff where it just repeats something it parsed off wikipedia or whatever. For anything serious, I find I don't get that much use out of it. I'm considering canceling my subscription because I think I'll be okay using 3.5 or whatever basic model I'd get. Am I alone here? Sorry for the ramble. I just feel like I had to put it out there.
52 by swman | 41 comments on Hacker News.
For context, I'm a experienced SWE working on some fairly complex things. I've been using programming GPT copilots for 6-8 months now and lately I've been using them less and less. I think for complete beginners or casual programmers, GPT might be mind-blowing and cool because it can create a for loop or recommend some solution to a common problem. However, for most of my tasks, it usually has ended up being a total waste of time and leads to frustration. Don't get me wrong, it is useful for those basic tasks for which in the past I'd do the google -> Stack Overflow route. However, for anything more complex, it falls flat. Just a recent example from last week - I was working on some dynamic SQL generation. To be fair, it was a really complex task and it was 5pm so I didn't feel like whiteboarding (when in doubt, always whiteboard and skip gpt lol). I thought I'd turn to GPT and ended up wasting 30 minutes while it kept hallucinating and giving me code that isn't even valid. It skipped some of the requirements and missed things like a GROUP BY which made the generated query not even work. When I told it that it missed this, it regenerated some totally different code that had other issues.. and I stopped. When chatGPT first came out I was using it all the time. Within a couple weeks though it became obvious it is really limited. I thought I'd wait a few months and maybe it would get better but it hasn't. Who exactly are copilots for if not beginners? I really don't find them that useful for programming because 80% of the time the solutions are a miss or worse don't even compile or work. I enjoy using it to write sci fi stories or learn more about some history stuff where it just repeats something it parsed off wikipedia or whatever. For anything serious, I find I don't get that much use out of it. I'm considering canceling my subscription because I think I'll be okay using 3.5 or whatever basic model I'd get. Am I alone here? Sorry for the ramble. I just feel like I had to put it out there.
Comments
Post a Comment