http://qs1969.pair.com?node_id=11151354


in reply to Re^2: Did ChatGPT do a good job?
in thread Did ChatGPT do a good job?

If haukex is thinking what I'm thinking, a different way to phrase it is that it is often more effort to find bugs in code that looks pretty good than to write it from scratch. This is the flip-side of the "Not-Invented-Here Syndrome". Sometimes I re-invent things just because I don't want to deal with someone else's hidden assumptions and design limitations that I won't realize until I'm way too committed to building on top of someone else's system. And, that's for programmers who know what they're doing. I looked at this code and didn't catch either of the bugs even after 3 reads, but I wouldn't have made either mistake if I wrote it myself. If I used this code, it would be a time bomb waiting to go off and debugging it would use up more time than it would take to write that boilerplate by hand.

Meanwhile I've found ChatGPT to be an amazing search engine. I can ask an abstract question that would be hard to google and it will pop out example code or paths or config files, and then I use the keywords in those examples to go look up the actual documentation. It's also generally faster and more to the point than google because I don't have to dig through spam results and run into a bunch of articles targeted at the wrong experience level that spend 50 pages explaining things I already know, or get distracted reading some flame war on a mailing list from 5 years ago.

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Re^4: Did ChatGPT do a good job?
by Bod (Parson) on Mar 31, 2023 at 22:47 UTC
    Meanwhile I've found ChatGPT to be an amazing search engine. I can ask an abstract question that would be hard to google

    Agreed - that's one of the best uses I have found for ChatGPT, Bard and other AI services...