ChatGPT Isn’t as Good at Coding as We Thought::undefined
I always thought of chat gpt as a “companion tool” that isn’t meant to write good code by itself, but to help programmers write good code (just like search engines and documentation)
Submitted 1 year ago by L4s@lemmy.world [bot] to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.pcmag.com/news/chatgpt-isnt-good-at-coding
ChatGPT Isn’t as Good at Coding as We Thought::undefined
I always thought of chat gpt as a “companion tool” that isn’t meant to write good code by itself, but to help programmers write good code (just like search engines and documentation)
Have you used it for this lately?
I want to believe it used to be okay for this, but just yesterday I uses it to generate some pretty basic bash and I’m honestly not convinced it saved me any time after I cleaned it all up and actually made it functional
I thought it was terrible. Is it worse than that?
I am using ChatGPT 4+ with the code interpreter to code c# scripts inside my Unity project and it works and to be unreliable, b it about a month ago when the code interpreter came out it became very useful. Like it rarely makes a compile error and when it does it often fixes it with no further issues. The code it writes is solid and it has even been able to write multiple, interacting scripts with singletons, etc to do all sorts of more complex things in Unity. It has saved my so much time I am blown away. Some of these scripts are 200-300 lines. Beyond 300 it seems to have many issues though al really only good for the smaller stuff, which is mostly what Unity tends to be.
It is also amazing as feeding it error logs and having it tell you the bits that matter and why. Everyone should be using it for this at a minimum.
I love it, but look forward to the day where it is in my Unity project editor and is able to see all and address all the ridiculous and mundane issues that consume far too much of my time and other developers time. Just finished implementing AssetBundles with it, which triggered many of my scripts needing to be updated, which it did in just a few seconds each. Amazing.
I don’t know how others are using chatGPT for coding, but I found I get the best results when starting small and iterate over the results few times. Like:
I use it mostly for Typescript, Bash and Clojure and results vary from good to OK (Clojure). The whole process is way faster if you use a tool like sGPT.
So so good for regex though.
And SQL queries
It’s like a rookie programmer or an intern at best. There has been times it has been really helpful though.
I used it extensively to help me code my PHP for an art portfolio site. Briefly thought about using 11ty but needed to put something up quick after being laid off and I knew PHP.
For the most part it was good. It was really good at creating simple functions for me. My issue came when I asked it to build me a JS lightbox in Bootstrap. i wanted it to look a certain way so I had to edit my prompt multiple times because it would edit the code and “forget” my previous modification. Ended up using someone else’s JS code.
It was incredibly frustrating. It’s powerful, but still limited.
Shouldn’t ChatGPT’s code be used as a template, anyway?
Whoever thought it was good at coding? That’s not what it’s designed for. It might get lucky and spit out somewhat functional code sometimes based on the prompt, but it never constructed any of that itself. Not truly. It’s conceptually Googling what it thinks it needs, copying and pasting together an answer that seems like it might be right, and going “Here, I made this”. It might be functional, it might be pure garbage. It’s a gamble.
You’re better off just writing your own code from the beginning. It’s likely going to be more efficient anyways, and you’ll properly understand what it does.
It’s fine. I’ve been using it for all sorts of languages. Some issues with rust though, but that’s because I’m a newbie and I can’t fix the errors chatgpt is producing.
Python, go, terraform… All great.
turkalino@lemmy.yachts 1 year ago
I asked it to write a bash script which simply read a couple inputs using readline and then ran a couple commands inside an if/else
It declared a variable that it never used. I pointed out the mistake and asked to remove the line. It simply renamed the variable.
I’d trust an unpaid intern more
fluxion@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Hah hah… What a dummy!
discreetly pushes his unused variables under desk with his foot
Ib_dI@lemm.ee 1 year ago
An unused variable!?
/clutches_pearls