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Comment by lockhouse | Hacker News Reader

I’ve only experienced the version of GPT that Bing chat provides, so take this with a grain of salt.

After the initial wow factor wore off, I just don’t have a lot of real world uses for AI chat bots.

I think it's great at simple technical questions, like "how do I do x in python". Hallucinations isn't really a problem since I am about to check if the solution works anyway.

That's why I'm less apocalyptic about it than most people I read. The people who can realistically use it to write software are the same people who can currently write software.

Though a lot more people can read software than can write software. All kids are exposed to programming at school these days. They may not get proficient enough to write code or a query but will probably be able to read and adapt code.

> Though a lot more people can read software than can write software.

Huh? As someone who's been doing both for a couple of decades, I'd have said the opposite, really. All programmers, more or less by definition, can write software. Bad programmers, however, often can't read it.

Yup. Senior engineers spend a lot more time reading software, than writing software. Juniors spend more time writing than reading.

We are talking about a chatgpt response here, a snippet of code.

It definitely helps me write more and better software

Apoplectic?

Apocalyptic, as in predicting an apocalypse

They're super useful for any kind of creative brainstorming. Give it some background information, ask it for a list of ideas about X, make some refinements, etc.

I think LLMs are pretty bad at producing any kind of finished material. They work best as something almost but not quite like a search engine.

Try it with code, when you have some weird issue like something not working it does good at spotting typos that your eyes will run over;

As an example I had code like

el.style.display = "none;"

the ; should have been after the " but my eyes could not spot the problem and the shit language did not complain since ; are optional.

Isn't ';' a proper delimiter in CSS fields though?

That sort of just makes it more insidious, no?

I agree. I tried to use it for some basic programming questions in a language I was not familiar with and it made up so much stuff that wasted my time because it looked reasonable, but was fake.

code and sql queries.

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