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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   3793 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 14, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Has anyone ever tried heavy amount of programming with ChatGPT (or any other AI)? I keep thinking I want to program a game. But I know from prior programming experience that there is lots of bullshit programming that I don't want to have to do. I'm wondering how far along I might get with AI assistance.

It's good for some things that can be solved with ten lines of code and that only depend on commonly understood concepts like files, databases and dates and not, for example, the architectural details of a private codebase. How complex of a game are you thinking and how do you see yourself describing what you want in the game to the AI? Games have lots of trickiness going on with them, they grow up to have idiosyncratic codebases where you need to understand the local architecture, bigger ones are logically very complex and all parts need to keep making sense given the overarching design, they're by definition somewhat unique and you often need to do many rounds of iteration to get the code to correspond to the behavior you want them to have.

If you are not a programmer then ChatGPT will not turn you into one.

It is useful for a programmers if they are stuck or write in some silly setup where you need tons of boilerplate.

Im not sure how much you would consider "heavy" but i have and the results were... not good.

On the flip side the requirements I work with tend to be much more stringent than anything the rank-and-file web or game developer has to work with.

I use Phind, and it's usually hopeless at debugging the errors I get. But it was the same with StackOverflow: by the time I resorted to asking there, two times out of three I was probably the one with the most knowledge about the problem.

On the other hand, Copilot is quite good at writing literal boilerplate code.

I use ChatGPT and phind.com for programming. It's great for generating ideas and I sometimes use it for writing some boilerplate code, but there are substantial bugs in perhaps 1 in 3 of the code snippets I ask it to write. Overall, it saves time, but you need to have a pretty good understanding of what a solution should look like, or you'll be led astray. Note, I'm using the free tier of both tools. Maybe it gets better if you pay for a subscription?

ChatGPT now serves GPT-4O for all users, paid or free, and while the paid tier has access to additional goodies, I'm pretty sure you're not missing out on anything substantial, including for programming purposes, by using the free tier. It's not like the old days, when there was a massive delta in usefulness between GPT 3.5 and 4, with the latter being doled out to paying users.

Thanks for clarifying. My eyes just glaze over on the prompts to upgrade, so I really have no idea what the differences between the free and paid tiers are.

Mainly access to image generation with DALLE, more conversations every 3 hours without being thrown back to GPT-3.5, and access to custom GPTs, which aren't really that useful to be honest.

You're not missing out on much, and it's a sign that OAI is sweating a little that they're handing out free access to their best public models at all, even before the Apple integration.

I am your guy for this.

I'm mostly a python programmer, but my work needed me to work with rails. I literally spent 6 months not writing a single line of rails.

Eventually, I got sick of this shit and just buckled down and learned the framework over a week. But to answer your question, it is technically possible to get GPT to do a WHOLE BUNCH of coding for you if you poke and prod at it like your livelihood depends on it.

I haven't used it for game development specifically, but from what I have used it for, this sounds like an ideal case. "Experienced programmer wants to get a quick start in a popular branch of programming which is new to him" is pretty much the sweet spot.

The two problems I run into are

  1. the more you give to ChatGPT to code for you, the quicker a progam of any length is going to lose you, and when you inevitably have to reconsider some decision you might get stuck trying to understand foreign code.

  2. ChatGPT is extremely annoying to troubleshoot with. It is over eager to spit out many steps at once, and tons of code example. It is very difficult for me to get ChatGTP to take things one step at a time with me in a back and forth manner.

ChatGPT is an amazing expert sitting right next to you who talks to much. But you need to keep him on a tight leash, and you will only hurt yourself in the future if you are too eager to let him drive.

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