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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'

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MagicShel@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ 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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theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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    Zexks@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    In a cave with pen and paper is nearly what I learned with. I learned with the run time, msdn, notepad and the cmd line. And yes you do end up in many situations where you simply don’t have or can’t use a full on ide everytime. Sounds like you’ve never really left your comfort zones and stuck your neck out in some tech you don’t understand quite yet. Or worked in areas under strict software controls.
    
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    MagicShel@lemmy.zip ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    It sounds like you are a much better developer than me, but to be fair I’ve had to teach myself everything using nothing but books and Google for thirty years. I’ve rarely had the luxury of working with someone who had the knowledge to mentor me, so I’ve probably missed some critical skills along the way.
    
    In a lot of ways, the AI fills that role because it’s better at answering questions than it is writing code. Earlier today it was explaining to me how a DOM selector could return a stale element in some cases because of a failing end to end test. It took a few back and forths with some code examples before I really understood why the selectors might not be working.
    
    It also suggested some code changes that I had to push back on because, even though the code had errors, the errors weren’t causing the problem. While building an array of promises I had awaited them, causing them to run serially instead of in parallel during Promise.all(). So you definitely have to know what you’re doing to avoid having the AI waste your time (or at least more time than it takes to push back).
    
    I’m still trying to debug it, but without the AI, I’d be googling the fuck out of typescript syntax, JavaScript idiosyncrasies, and a whole testing framework I’ve never seen before.
    
    So…
    
    if the only real value that AI provides is “you don’t need to know the libraries you’re using” …returns false.
    
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brsrklf@jlai.lu ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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    MagicShel@lemmy.zip ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Logically, you would be right. My practical experience is I waste a lot less time trying to google multiple explanations something because one by itself isn’t helping me figure it out, writing bugged PoC test code and thinking something is broken, sorting through a bunch of things that haven’t been relevant for 3 versions, etc.
    
    Of course the AI is trained on the same material we can an all find and read, but it does it orders of magnitude more quickly. The trade off is that it’s not always right, but neither am I and neither are most sources on the internet right in all circumstances. But it’s so fast and easy that I can iterate and evolve designs and understanding much more quickly than I could on my own.
    
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- adespoton@lemmy.ca ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  There’s also the fact that
  
  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.
  
  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 ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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