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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3950 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 23, 2023

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Getting the development environment running for a project is one of the worst aspects of programming IMO. Some people thrive on it and don't get bothered but for me, it goes something like this.

to fix this dependency conflict just run A B C in your terminal.

Then you find out that running A B C, each comes with its own A's B's, and C's and then they recurse forever. You just pray this is the last time you run random terminal commands from StackOverflow and this time it will work.

On the other hand, using ChatGPT is depriving you of learning the debugging skills many of us from the older days before language models had to earn through suffering but at least we know how to do it without gpt.

Also docker has been a godsend in this regard. Also if you are really struggling with getting the dev environment up, maybe its just because you are on Windows. Things are a lot easier to get up and running on Mac and Linux.

Thank you for illustrating the exact process I followed, in undergrad, as I decided not to pursue software engineering.

Then you find out that running A B C, each comes with its own A's B's, and C's and then they recurse forever. You just pray this is the last time you run random terminal commands from StackOverflow and this time it will work.

After programming for long enough, you get really good at installing software and fixing build errors.

On the other hand, using ChatGPT is depriving you of learning the debugging skills many of us from the older days before language models had to earn through suffering but at least we know how to do it without gpt.

Is this a bad thing? Like why would we need debugging skills if ChatGPT can solve that problem?

Oh and I actually have been using a Mac.

Like why would we need debugging skills if ChatGPT can solve that problem?

Because there are lots of problems where ChatGPT is not helpful or gives outright incorrect information that a layman won't even recognize as incorrect.

Eventually chatGPT runs into the fundamental problem of not having enough context. Impossible for it to debug many issues in medium and large codebases.

Thus my observation that all the examples I've seen of how ChatGPT is supposedly oh so helpful in programming are really examples of what'd be better called scripting.

Good luck getting ChatGPT to write you the required initialization code for ffmpeg mp4 encoder with sensible quality and speed settings since the defaults are utterly braindead (the required code is ~100 lines of largely undocumented structs and function calls).

Because..

A guy who uses chatGPT and knows how to debug is more powerful than a guy who uses chatGPT and doesn't know how to debug.

I know a lot of posters here have some insane timelines on AGI and think any endeavor of knowledge or skill acquisition is useless because AGI will make us all useless tomorrow. Which MIGHT HAPPEN.

But assuming LLM's don't improve all that much in the near future and we don't get the GOD AGI, what I said will hold. It certainly holds in the present.

The people who know how to code are more effective using GPT than those who don't, if anything they reap exponential gains relative to those who don't know "the basics"

More or less every example I've seen of ChatGPT's touted benefits to programming has had little to do with programming and has ended up being just fairly simple scripting.

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