Have used a few coding models and they are good, but they will not replace a programmer. You can ask for a class to be made, or a method. You can ask it to find issues or improvements with/for your code or spot mistakes, but it can’t hack multiple modules and give you a fully working complex app. It’ll help you learn to code, it’ll write you whatever you ask, but when you start adding the fact you need to know about X for y and z is also important it starts forgetting the original prompt.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s really good. But it’s a tool, not a full on master coder.
Looking forward to getting more tokens to work with on a normal computer. Happy to wait for the CPU to gen code considering the ridiculous prices of high VRAM GPUs these days, but it’s still fisher price ‘My first AI coding assistant’. Give it a few more years, a few more breakthroughs and we will get there.
I have tried GPT Engineer… it’s not there yet. Will make you a simple app, but it’s not going to knock out anything more than modular microshite.
Officially, this time 😂
And if it was actually good and fully usable they’d just use it themselves to make billions…
Imagine you could just write a specification for any software project in the world (even invest some programmers and project managers to do it together with reviews), throw it at the AI and you get a fully functioning program out. Preferably even with a DevOps pipeline set up, so all you have to do is copy it into AWS, Azure or whatever, throw money at it and you’re done.
They wouldn’t give that away, lol.
Definitely not how it works. It’ll be a tool for programmers to make them more efficient. It’ll be like the difference between a hammer and nails and a nail gun. You still need the worker to know where to put the nail.
Writing code is fast, checking it’s correct and debugging is slow. If some AI spits out 2000 lines of code it won’t make you faster at all.
Have you tried asking ChatGPT or Bard to write you code to do something? It is actually remarkably good at it.
That and being an alternative to a thesaurus is about all I use LLMs for.Lol, yeah, and it hallucinates all the time. You also use it to just write a little bit of new code, you can’t give it a 100k lines code base and tell it to actually add or modify something…
Indeed, and for me giving me a rough framework to modify is hugely useful and time saving. As the commenter above said it’s a tool, it’s not a team member.
With code it doesn’t hallucinate all that much if you prompt well.
Ive created complex powershell scripts with it. I never used powershell before. Some actual developers checked my work and admitted that they where impressed, questioned why someone with my skill didn’t pursue the career of dev. my prior Experience is failing at programming class (was never any good at writing my own code, just understand it reasonably well. ) and modding games. The programming teacher i had hinted that i should find something else.
My work now offered. I looked at the powershell classes, the stuff i am doing daily is covered by the advanced class which i can only do if i succeed the basic class. I don’t expect to learn much.
Chatgpt is the best teacher i ever had. Yes it makes mistakes but so did every other teacher i ever had. Chatgpt at least adapts if i call out its bullshit.
Sheesh, trying to get a PowerShell script to do something you can learn in a day or two (if you’re interested).
Actual programming is mostly grabbing a larger system (or micro services), interacting with other interfaces and databases, modifying and extending existing code (which is what I do 99% of the time, it’s really rare to write something new from the ground up in most companies). DevOps where you might also handle deployment pipelines. And so on.
You always work in bigger systems. Sure, sometimes you write helper scripts, but that’s the easy stuff.
So yes, I can obviously ask ChatGPT to set up a REST API for me with a handful of endpoints and it will do that reasonably well. If I also want it to connect to a database though it might try to set that up, but that will fail (as you have to actually do steps yourself to make it work). It’s good for boilerplate code, but nothing more than that.
“programming is mostly grabbing a larger system (or micro services), interacting with other interfaces and databases, modifying and extending existing code”
Yes, i just happen to use powershell to make the api calls to maken changes in the database because thats what my job said i should use. Then i extend the functionality of what the scripts can do by modifying the code. Chatgpt was a great help at providing a quality result, much more then i would on my own.
No it doesnt replace the job of a actual programmers, no one expects it to do that for the time being.
Also many programmers write their own stuff for generating boilerplate code, with some languages like D having a strong support for it via its metaprogramming features. All while being more reliable.
How does one use it?
