Maybe it’s because I’m only using it as plan B or C (after the documentation has already failed me), but I have never gotten any usable code out of chatGPT.
And yet co-pilot is able to finish my code perfectly after I type the first few characters… even though they’re the same model.
ChatGPT is amazing for describing what you want, getting a reasonable output, and then rewriting nearly the whole thing to fit your needs. It’s a faster (shittier) stack overflow.
I normally have it output toy examples of the syntax I don’t want to bother learning and then remix that into what I need. IMO it’s better than stackoverflow because stackoverflow code is more likely to be not really what you were searching for or not actually run because the author didn’t bother testing it and there’s a typo or something.
Programming with AI help is like having the expert chef at my shoulder, giving me tips, but he’s high as hell on three different mild altering drugs.
Then he’s like “That cake needs some lemon juice. Trust me.”
Unless it’s Microsoft documentation in which case it feels more like bill gates beating me over the head with the frying pan until I give up and find an alternative way to achieve my goal
Or AWS documentation. Trying to use it feels like getting tortured with thumbscrews.
I hate it so much. It’s a cyclical maze of ignorance and frustration.
Google, on the other hand, may have my hand in marriage.
I feel like for simple algorithms chatGPT could be good. Like as a reference for how to code something. But if it’s simple code I often find it faster to just write it myself then reorganize whatever it makes to work with and match the style of other code in my codebase. And if it’s complex code I often find it harder to describe what I want then to just make it.
In my experience, what makes gpt-4 great for coding is its astonishing knowledge of available software libraries, built-in interface features, etc.
I’ll tell it the task I want done, and it will tell me where to find, and how to install the necessary dependencies.
With zero experience in browser extension design, gpt-4 helped me to build an incredibly complicated Chrome extension, using vector database; creating a custom, cloud-based server; web scraping with headless browsers, voice recognition, speech synthesis, wake-word capabilities, and a sophisticated user interface. I had ZERO experience with ANY of these.
For me, using gpt-4 was like collaborating with a just okay programmer, but one who had extensive experience with literally every programming language, API, protocol, etc.
And it was a collaboration. We would talk through problems together. I would make observations and guesses about why a block of code wasn’t working, and it would tell me why I was wrong, or alternately tell me I was right, and produce a fixed version.
So what are you building? A browser STT interface for chatting with GPT and other LLMs?
I’m not ready to talk about it in detail. Even my boss doesn’t know. But you’re in the right ballpark.
I’m actually building a proof-of-concept prototype for what I want to work on… and I’m using a browser extension so that I can build it independently without anyone from the tech team being involved and slowing me down.
That sounds nice. I’ve been looking at serenade.ai and thought about extending their STT with an option to use another third-party STT engine. I would then like to extend their command engine with LLM command recognition. In my experience, maybe also with my pronunciation as a non-english speaker, their STT and command recognition really doesn’t work that well.
Have you tried Whisper from OpenAI? It’s the best I’ve ever seen. I’m curious how it would handle accents.
No, not yet. But thanks for the tip!
Haha indeed!
It’s funny when it starts to just invent things. Like packages, with version number!, that… do not exists…
Or when it outputs code without using the variables …
The most annoying thing is imho that it keeps explaining everything al the time. Even when I prompt “you have a working app with vuejs…” and others it sometimes still explains how to setup the app.
That said: the tool has become a staple in my workflow whenever I need a starting point. Or have to do some math algorithmic things
Are you using version 3.5 or 4?
I think both are fine. But when I see 3.5 has difficulties, I usually switch to 4 and get the job done there.
Why use 3.5 at all in that case?
Because I only have 50 messages in 3 hours
