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this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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For the love of God, if you're a junior programmer you're overestimating your understanding if you keep relying on chatGPT thinking 'of course I'll spot the errors'. You will until you won't and you end up dropping the company database or deleting everything in root.
All ChatGPT is doing is guessing the next word. And it's trained on a bunch of bullshit coding blogs that litter the internet, half of which are now chatGPT written (without any validation of course).
If you can't take 10 - 30 minutes to search for, read, and comprehend information on stack overflow or docs then programming (or problem solving) just isn't for you. The junior end of this feel is really getting clogged with people who want to get rich quick without doing any of the legwork behind learning how to be good at this job, and ChatGPT is really exarcebating the problem.
A lot of the time this is just looking for syntax though; you know what you want to do, and it's simple, but it is gated behind busywork. This is to me the most useful part about ChatGPT, it knows all the syntax and will write it out for you and answer clarifying questions so you can remain in a mental state of thinking about the actual problem instead of digging through piles of junk for a bit of information.
Somehow you hit an unpopular opinion landmine with the greybeard devs.
For the greybeard devs: Try asking ChatGPT to write you some Arduino code to do a specific task. Even if you don't know how to write code for an Arduino, ChatGPT will get you 95% of the way there with the proper libraries and syntax.
No way in hell I'm digging through forums and code repos for hours to blink an led and send out a notification through a web hook when a sensor gets triggered if AI can do it for me in 30 seconds. AI obviously can't do everything for you if you've never coded anything before, but it can do a damn good job of translating your knowledge of one programming language into every other programming language available.
It's great for jumping into something you're very unfamiliar with. Unfortunately, if you often find yourself very unfamiliar with day to day tasks, you're probably incompetent. (Or maybe a butterfly who gets paid to learn new things every day.)
Getting paid to learn new things everyday at work is a dream, I don't see the issues
The issue is it's a dream.
BIIIIG problem: The last 5%.
Did ChatGPT just hallucinate it? Does it exist but it isn't used like ChatGPT says? Does it exist but it doesn't do what ChatGPT thinks it does?
I use ChatGPT sometimes to help out with stuff at home (I've tried it for work stuff but the stuff I work on is niche enough that it purely hallucinates), and I've ended up running in circles for hours because the answer I got ended up in this uncanny valley: Correct enough that it isn't immediately obviously wrong, but incorrect enough that it won't work, it can't work, and you're going to really have to put a lot of work in to figure that out.