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Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 23, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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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).