Comment on OpenAI just launched its new ChatGPT Agent that can make as many as 1 complicated cupcake order per hour, but even Sam Altman says you probably shouldn't trust it for 'high-stakes uses'

Wazowski@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• MagicShel@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  It won’t do that well. What you have to do is ask it to help you leverage your existing development skills in an unfamiliar domain. I used it to help me write a python program to authenticate, pull and filter data from a GCP firestore database and create an XLSX with summary and detail sheets.

  I’ve never used Python before in my life. It took me about 4 hours. Of course I’ve been doing that sort of thing in Java for many years. Turned out I wrote that faster in Python than I could in Java. Configuring the connection to that database in Python was so simple compared to Java.

  The stuff it wrote was sometimes incomplete or wrong in subtle ways, but I could see the bits that didn’t make sense which helped me focus on those things and ask better questions to help me figure it out. I think the last hour was just me tweaking stuff by myself because I didn’t need help with it by that point.

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  • brsrklf@jlai.lu ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I needed about 30 minutes to do a python application from scratch that took linear JSON data files, merged them and presented them as a tree in a GUI.

    Before that I had barely done anything in python, basically could do a basic function declaration with a simple operation and nothing else.

    But like you I had experience with java and such, and those skills transfer. All it took was searching basic syntax/related code examples and required library imports. And I mean basic, search engine search, not AI answers.

    All I’m saying is, I really don’t think AI is providing anything a lot more efficient than doing a good old crawl through API docs and stack overflow. So the fact it’s using tremendous amounts of resources to maybe achieve a 10% efficiency boost is bothering me a lot.

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    • MagicShel@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      If that was a 10% boost for you and you could’ve done it in 33 minutes without AI or experience, then my imposter syndrome has been right all along!

      I’d bet that would’ve take me a few days and maybe buying a reference book and starting with hello world.

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      • brsrklf@jlai.lu ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Did the AI gave you a starting point that would be very different from a bit of code someone submitted 10 years ago on stack exchange? Because in my experience, everything has already been asked and answered. This includes the most basic and naive stuff, and often I am very grateful for it, because, yeah, sometimes I need someone to guide me through the most basic stuff.

        In fact, the AI needed that exact knowledge base and a bunch more to exist in the first place. It’s just vaguely competent at retrieving it.

        Anyway, I didn’t say I had no experience, just the most minimal python experience. There are definitely a few quirks I had to learn (the data structures mostly), but for the rest is mostly finding the right method in the reference library, like you would in java.

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    • adespoton@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      There’s also the fact that

      1. It’s only really good at this if you want it to generate Python, PowerShell, bash, or C++ code. Try any other language and it quickly assumes you’re using outdated and often incompatible libraries or doesn’t really understand how the language functions.
      2. at the end of it all, neither you nor the AI has learned anything new; you’ll have to put in the exact same amount of work the next time. If you do it yourself, then over time that 10% advantage goes away.

      Now, these things could both change over time, but humans are much more efficient to train than current state of the art probability sieves we call GenAI.

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      • Zexks@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        It’s only assuming if you aren’t specific enough. And you do know their training is usually a year or two or 3 old. So they don’t know about whatever new shit your trying to work with.

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  • theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Anyone who already knows another programming language but has never used python in their life can write a simple python app quickly, regardless

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    • Zexks@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      No you can’t if you don’t know the libraries. Python is entirely dependent on what libraries you include. If you don’t know what you need you can’t do shit.

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      • theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        No you can’t if you don’t know the libraries

        IDE.

        Python is entirely dependent on what libraries you include

        ??

        If you don’t know what you need you can’t do shit.

        IDE.

        The problems you propose in your comment are not only greatly exaggerated but already been solved for decades using conventional tools AND apply to literally all languages, having nothing at all to do with python. Good try! My statement holds true.

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• Eyekaytee@aussie.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  for coding you want to use claude

  if you don’t want to pay for claude after so many messages what you can do is use mistral to code it up then use claude to proof check the code

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  • Wazowski@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    tx, will try it some time.

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