A cautionary tale about chatgpt for advanced developers | Prime Reacts 

When I try to help my colleagues without being judgemental, they panic. They're not used to it lol

great wisdom here@@theodorealenas3171

Kind of like a beagle.

@baked-with-bry That's an excellent description.

This 100% Sometimes when I learn / figure something out with chatGPT I'm just confused by "without chatGPT how could I even learn this, how could I even google these questions".

The cynicism that politician implies is mostly absent. I've been saying improv actor - it's going to do something, if possible something that fits the prompt, but it'll jump into fantasy just as quick as real world problems.

It has the right answer. You just asked the question wrong.

@@JustBCWi Chat gpt (at least gpt3.5) is still very bad at probability formulas which is most of what i spend my time programming. It also has trouble doing anything beyond bachelors level math, and working with larger codebases doesn’t help either. If you are using libraries that have documentation that already exists on the internet, then gpt is great. But I wouldn’t recommend using gpt if you are doing any difficult math or writing lower level programs.

@@brosauce2814 skill issue

because the gpt 3.5 is trained on dataset that available in september 2021 below, so it doesn't know knowledge that released above that date. you should look at the gpt 4 for code or knowledge that released above september 2021 in real world, or try google gemini because it trained on new knowledge but it has lower ability to understand context than chatgpt and sometimes it forget about what topic we are discussing, but it is catching up now. so its heavily depends on the dataset

If we oversample stackoverflow posts and retrained gippity....

@SolarPlayer there should be a stack overflow plugin for all these LLMs. You ask it a question, it berates you, gives you an answer, then gives you 4 more answers, fights with itself about which answer is better and then devolves into timing the solutions down to the micro second to win the argument

@@SolarPlayer You should also include Quora

"Well, if you RTFM you f'n noob you wouldn't have to waste our precious time and internet space with your stupid question. " Yeah I won't ever miss SO. ChatGPT is so much nicer, I don't even care if it's wrong sometimes.

​@brianhourigan God the amount of times we have all seen this exact type of discussion over the years. Too accurate 😂

Big agree. Also sometimes I don’t want copilot to take my current code into account, I just want to bounce general ideas off of it.

Do you mind expanding a little on this? New reference as in a different code block to help it understand your goal or the same code block stated a different way to reinforce what you are looking for?

@@DaveTheChronicler sure! It all goes back to the original paper that sparked the fire, Attention is All you Need. Getting GPT4 to behave the way you want is about providing the right context. When starting a conversation, I’d recommend including a copy of the relevant file or function you’re asking it about. Then take some time to write out your thoughts. Then provide clear bite sized instruction for it. If you have a big enough knowledge gap that you can’t understand a proposed solution you should start by asking it to brainstorm with you rather than offer a specific solution. If the LLM ever gets off track and sends something way off base, that is now polluting your context window and distracting the ai. Ideally you should immediately revise your message and regenerate the response for cleaner context. Alternatively if that’s too late you should paste in your current working code again for reference. This will put the pollutant message further back in the context window which helps the ai get back on track. Additionally, do not berate the AI or ask petty questions like “why didn’t you do that the first time?”. The answer to that question is because you provided it the wrong context. By asking it these questions you’re just adding irrelevant messages to your chat feed and pushing valuable information out of the context window. There are times however when GPT4 will refuse to believe that something you’re doing works or is real. These are the most confusing times to use ChatGPT. Sometimes you have to be confident in your own abilities and be able to recognize when it’s gaslighting you. The app I created is going to be launching soon on iOS. Would you have any interest in me coming back to this thread to let you know when it does? I’ve found that by providing these two simple utilities, pinning and hiding, it drastically improves the usability of the model in an easy and (I hope) intuitive way.

​@@DaveTheChronicleri think it means put more code of your project to the chat, so the chatgpt receives more info about what you are trying to do. the simple analogy is like : you ask someone : "do you know a girl?" it different put more information like : "do you know a girl with blue dress and black glasses and black shoes?"

Learn to phrasing things Hella neutrally

If you say a junior dev on your team recommended it ChatGPT will be a lot more critical

🤚 Using books, documentation and other resources as a learning tool. 👉 Using a poor regurgitation of those books and documentation as a learning tool (that's wrong like 30% of the time).

Australian mentioned let’s go!

When it comes to implementing a complex system, it can be useful to bounce ideas off of, not really ask for it to code things out for you. It's decent at talking about things from a high level. If you ask it to code a complex system it will fail spectacularly though. You kind of start understanding its strengths and weaknesses over time and what it can actually help you with and where it's useless.

​@@EvilTim1911definitely. It can discuss the high level stuff, because there's a ton of books and text on that. It can write simple code, because there's a ton of that. An actually novel problem is where it struggles

​​@@EvilTim1911that's pretty much how I treat it. I give it small scale and high level idea of what I'm looking for and then see what it spits out and converse with it in a way about what it spat out. It's kinda like a virtual pair programmer to bounce ideas off of while also being a faster replacement for things like Google and stack overflow. In fact I find it better than Google or stack overflow because I'm thinking more about my problem at hand to arrive at a solution rather than being laser focused on finding a solution.

​@@EvilTim1911The bounce ideas off part is the real USP of these bots. You don't really get that with a search engine. You can't ask an article a clarifying question. The best you can do is comment or post somewhere and wait for a response. With LLMs you can ask it questions, and while it may be wrong at times, it's still very helpful.

exactly. it's a tool that you learn to use like google. and it will get a lot better. so reevaluating constantly is also a big part. e.g. ppl who only used gpt 3.5 are being left out saying it's not useful. @@EvilTim1911

The issue is that you're learning off a snapshot from 2021. LINQ didn't change much in that time, but things like LeanProver have moved to a completely different version, and GPT has zero clue what the new syntax should look like. Any new library, any new version of a language or framework, is going to trip GPT up, and it might (and will) suggest code with outdated practices. It's the same issue as with old tutorials, except that here, there is no way to know how old the knowledge it's spitting out is

​GPT-4s training cutoff is now April 2023.​@@shadamethyst1258

​​@@shadamethyst1258Not an issue if you use Microsoft Copilot. It has access to the internet. And it cites it's sources. I believe even ChatGPT 4 does.

100% this is my exact same experience. I had to ship a companion web app for my businesses mobile app and built it in nextjs after being frustrated with no-code tools... So I got from zero to sixty real fast but then there are so many knowledge gaps which I had to backfill with more traditional learning

I also do that and I also ask chatGPT to do the thinking for me so I don't even have to form my own opinions

Video ? Since when does it read video

That's what it reminded me of.

Gotta have a lot of faith for it to do that lol

If most people struggle with regex, then I'm not sure if I would trust an AI tbh.

Yeah, that looks literally insane. Whoever wrote that needs to snap out of his fever dream. I hope this isn't the standard in Typescript world.

It's a small project maintained mainly by that sole individual, so I think it's justifiable to have such typeacript code there. In larger code bases maintained by many people I'd say such code would be crazy.

OCaml/Rescript.

If you use ChatGPT, your brain is learning something. You are learning about prompt engineering and how to ask more accurate questions.

⁠​⁠@@kidmoseythe dangerous thing about LLMs is they don't actually know the meaning of the sentences they construct. It's just a combination of mathematics and computation. So for a very simple answer with wide consensus, like "how do I declare a variable in C?", it is very good. However, as questions become more complex and less well-documented, it is significantly less useful.

@@christopherflinn4910 Yes, the more data it has to draw from, the more accurate it's answers will be. Don't ask it anything about Godot game engine, because it will fabricate about half the API

@@kidmoseylong live the Unity slayer

> I love that I can ask ChatGPT "How do I build a string dynamically in Java?" You can do the same thing with Google though (even without the AI).

free for university students

@@iamvalenci4that’s really cool. I also have it for free

Why go to college if you are just going to use chatGPT? plus is a cs degree still worth the time and money? save the money and time ??

@@hardcorecodethat's why I learn CS on my own and instead am planning to go back to college for a EE degree instead. people like gingerBill (a college educated physicist not a CS person) can learn all they need to create stuff like a complete programming language and an industry grade particle simulation software for VFX the degree is unnecessary if you're motivated enough, whereas EE is a monumental task to learn on ur own and even then without the degree you wouldnt be able to join an order of engineers for that field (which is more important in that field than for CS tbh since software eng seems to be generally the wild west even in methodology and reliability)

@@hardcorecode ​ I don't think my earlier comment posted for some reason, but my personal take is that college is worth it if you have the time and money, but I'm taking courses online through boot dev which teaches you CS material and is a really valuable source of knowledge for software engineering. I'm learning for a lot cheaper, and at my own pace because I work full time. When it comes to ChatGPT, I think it's an extremely useful tool for experienced developers, but those with no programming experience will accomplish little to none trying to use it to write code. I'm nowhere near a senior developer, so trying to use and understand ChatGPT is a nightmare. I use it to explain things to me which is nice, but you still need programming knowledge. That being said, if you want to learn programming, do it. It will become less about knowing things like how to sort an array (very basic stuff) and more about problem solving skills. Knowing how to write code is basically like learning how to do math, we have calculators but we still need to understand it to do more advanced problems, once that take many steps and tons of different things to consider. I hope this was useful😁😁

@@FlanPoirot Not necessarily, in college you get to learn a lot. A degree is still worth it IMO. It all depends on the college you go to however.

@@hardcorecode ​ I don't think my earlier comment posted for some reason, but my personal take is that college is worth it if you have the time and money, but I'm taking courses online through bootdev which teaches you CS material and is a really valuable source of knowledge for software engineering. I'm learning for a lot cheaper, and at my own pace because I work full time. When it comes to chatGPT, I think it's an extremely useful tool for experienced developers, but those with no programming experience will accomplish little to none trying to use it to write code. I'm nowhere near a senior developer, so trying to use and understand chatGPT is a nightmare. I use it to explain things to me which is nice, but you still need programming knowledge. That being said, if you want to learn programming, do it. It will become less about knowing things like how to sort an array (very basic stuff) and more about problem solving skills. Knowing how to write code is basically like learning how to do math, we have calculators but we still need to understand it to do more advanced problems, once that take many steps and tons of different things to consider. I hope this was useful😁😁

I don’t know how to use copilot. I tried and it felt more robotic and I wasn’t confident about it haha. Slowly trying to figure it out

I used to chatgpt a ton when it first came out and I have a ton of gaps to fill, but now since I've learn from it, even with the paid version I find myself actually asking less question now

it’s probably getting dumber due to all the new ai generated content in new training data

In my experience, the majority of people studying at university don't actually care about the subject. They just want to do the bare minimum to pass so they can get a "good job", which they will inevitably hate because they don't care about the subject.