Ask HN: Do you use any ChatGPT like tool for coding? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you use any ChatGPT like tool for coding?

10 pointsreact_learner12 comments

I decided to start a project in a new language (React) and used GPT-4 through ChatGPT subscription to ask questions, get basic informations and some guidance. So far, it worked decently.

Lately, I find that GPT-4 has an harder time grasping complex applications / usecases going away from CRUD screens.

After reading this comment [0], I figured some tools may be more suited that ChatGPT, especially regarding development.

Do you use any tool, self hosted or not, to help you develop and code ?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36676470

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Of course I don’t know what your chat threads have looked like, but I suspect a big part of the issue is that when you’re asking it to help you with something you’re new to, you don’t know enough to ask the right questions or guide it.

Quite a few people I know have given up on using Chatgpt for code because it rarely gives you the right answer (or a working one) the first time. It takes some shaping.

I find that if you treat it more as a pair programmer that is doing the driving, and you just guide it and tell it when it makes mistakes/is doing something you don’t want, it usually get the result you want, and faster then if you wrote it yourself.

I usually try to approach it first in a functional way, asking me to describe how this would translate into React code, and then breakdown into smaller units. It usually worked well, rather than simply "write this for me".

And yes, a pair programmer is how I'd define it best. Beats an intern ... sadly

No.

Code I write is mine in the eyes of the legal system.

Not sure what the legal status of model generated code is.

I also can't be sure what will happen to the information I expose in my prompts, so I have to expect that it is not safe if it is secret/proprietary.

Same here. I never input any sensitive info to ChatGPT. Only prompts like: “Explain, step by step, how to write a PAM config from scratch”.

I would not trust GPT to grasp the pitfalls and quirks of PAM configs, it's a very sensitive part of a systems overall security.

Indeed. But it’s not a replacement for the official documentation. It’s a complement.

I've mainly used ChatGPT for the learning side of coding. It's useful for learning new frameworks or languages by giving me examples. It's tripped me up a few times when it combines different ways of doing things though (e.g. when a framework has changed how things work in different major versions).

As others have pointed out, it's ill-advised to directly put ChatGPT output in any production code for many reasons.

Zed has recently added ChatGPT support and it does come in handy. I’ll occasionally ask it simple stuff that I don’t want to look up like ‘what is a typical implementation of X or Y in Rust’.

It usually gives me either a working example or enough information to create one myself. I never paste my code into a prompt and rarely copy generated code.

So far I have mostly used ChatGPT for problems where I could neither find clear documentation nor good blog posts. Examples: PAM, using SQL in Go.

Edit: So in this way of working, the focus is less on having ChatGPT spit out a working application and more on explaining how the component works.

I am not permitted to use it at work.

I have tested it with Go and Python and it makes mistakes.

But here is where I find it useful. When I am not sure if a particular Python module exists, I ask it for that. Most of the time it can point me to one or more modules in pypi.

I use ChatGPT occasionally to produce complicated queries, or to do some complicated stuff on nested data structures (if I don't care to give them example data).

Other than the official tools and API, no

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