• xmunk@sh.itjust.works
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    10 months ago

    ChatGPT is hilariously incompetent… but on a serious note, I still firmly reject tools like copilot outside demos and the like because they drastically reduce code quality for short term acceleration. That’s a terrible trade-off in terms of cost.

    • ToothlessFairy@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      I enjoy using copilot, but it is not made to think for you. It’s a better autocomplete, but don’t ever let it do more than a line at once.

        • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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          10 months ago

          As a software engineer, the number of people I encounter in a given week who either refuse to or are incapable of understanding that distinction baffles and concerns me.

          • EatYouWell@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            That’s because it’s being advertised as a solution. That’s why you have people worried it’ll take their jobs when in reality it’ll let them do the job better.

      • takeda@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        The problem I have with it is that all the time it saves me I have to use on reading the code. I probably spend more time on that as once in a while the code it produces is broken in a subtle way.

        I see some people swearing by it, which is the opposite of my experience. I suspect that if your coding was copying code from stack overflow then it indeed improved your experience as now this process is streamlined.

          • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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            10 months ago

            I don’t know if it does yet, but if ChatGPT starts providing source for every information, then it would make it much faster to find the relevant information and check their sources, rather than clicking websites one by one.

            • tourist@lemmy.world
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              10 months ago

              Yep, ChatGPT4 allows optional calls to Bing now.

              It used to have a problem with making a claims that were not relevant to or contradicted its own sources, but I don’t recall encountering that problem recently.

    • stjobe@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Biggest problem with it is that it lies with the exact same confidence it tells the truth. Or, put another way, it’s confidently incorrect as often as it is confidently correct - and there’s no way to tell the difference unless you already know the answer.

      • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
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        10 months ago

        it’s kinda hilarious to me because one of the FIRST things ai researchers did was get models to identify things and output answers together with the confidence of each potential ID, and now we’ve somehow regressed back from that point

        • did we really regress back from that?

          i mean giving a confidence for recognizing a certain object in a picture is relatively straightforward.

          But LLMs put together words by their likeliness of belonging together under your input (terribly oversimplified).the confidence behind that has no direct relation to how likely the statements made are true. I remember an example where someone made chatgpt say that 2+2 equals 5 because his wife said so. So chatgpt was confident that something is right when the wife says it, simply because it thinks these words to belong together.

    • DudeDudenson@lemmings.world
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      10 months ago

      they drastically reduce code quality for short term acceleration.

      Oh boy do I have news for you, that’s basically the only thing middle managers care about, short tem acceleration

    • PlexSheep@feddit.de
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      10 months ago

      I’m still convinced that GitHub copilot is actively violating copyleft licenses. If not in word, then in the spirit.

    • TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz
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      10 months ago

      they drastically reduce … quality for short term acceleration

      Western society is built on this principle

          • PetDinosaurs@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            My hairline has started receding very rapidly. There’s there’s these fine hairs all over my desk, and I see the photo I took when joining directly before turning on my camera every meeting.

            • noobdoomguy8658@feddit.de
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              10 months ago

              Doesn’t sood good at all. I’m sorry to hear that, friend. I really hope there’s enough upsides there compared to working at a more mature company for you.

      • CanadaPlus@futurology.today
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        10 months ago

        Sort of. Nobody’s cutting corners on aviation structural components, for example. We’ve been pretty good at maximizing general value output, and usually that means lower quality, but not always.

      • EatYouWell@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        It’s helped me a bit with resolving weird tomcat/Java issues when upgrading to RHEL8, though. It didn’t give me an answer, but it gave me ideas on where to look (in my case I didn’t realize fapolicyd replaced selinux)

        • noobdoomguy8658@feddit.de
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          10 months ago

          That’s the point - you have the expertise to make proper sense of whatever it outputs. The people pushing for “AI” the most want to rely on it without any necessary expertise or just minimal efforts, like feeding it some of your financial reports and have generate a 5-year strategy only to fail miserably and have no one to blame this time (will still blame anyone else but themselves btw).

          It’s not the most useless tool in the world by any means, but the mainstream talk is completely out of touch with reality on the matter, and so are mainstream actions (i.e. overrelying on it and putting way too much faith into it).

      • Fubber Nuckin'@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Yeah, it can speed up the process but you still have to know how to do it yourself when it inevitably messes something up.

    • rwhitisissle@lemmy.ml
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      10 months ago

      An unpopular opinion, I am sure, but if you’re a beginner with something - a new language, a new framework - and hate reading the docs, it’s a great way of just jumping into a new project. Like, I’ve been hacking away on a django web server for a personal project and it saved me a huge amount of time with understanding how apps are structured, how to interact with its settings, registering urls, creating views, the general development lifecycle of the project and the basic commands I need to do what I’m trying to do. God knows Google is a shitshow now and while Stackoverflow is fine and dandy (when it isn’t remarkably toxic and judgmental), the fact is that it cuts down on hours of fruitless research, assuming you’re not asking it to do anything genuinely novel or hyper-specific.

    • Wes_Dev@lemmy.ml
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      10 months ago

      It helps a complete newbie like me get started and even learn while I do. Due to its restrictions and shortcoming, I’ve been having to learn how to structure and plan a project more carefully and thoughtfully, even creating design specs for programs and individual functions, all in order to provide useful prompts for ChatGPT to act on. I learn best by trial and error, with the ability to ask why things happened or are the way they are.

      So, as a secondary teaching assistant, I think it’s very useful. But trying to use the API for ChatGPT 4 is…not worth it. I can easily blow through $20 in a few hours. So, I got a day and a half of use out of it before I gave up. :|