4 Apr
2025
4 Apr
'25
12:52 a.m.
On Thu, Apr 3, 2025, 3:51 PM Will Cooke via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
wrote:
That's what I've found too. Generate the boilerplate for me: not very
creative but usuall 90+% right for code I'll be rototilling anyway.
Small code: usually ok. Generate about 10-50 lines it's ok. But much more
than that and the errors are too high to be worth it. Debugging time
becomes much higher than the just write it from scratch time. Small
snippets are also easier to catch errors on too.
It's not terrible. On par with autocomplete emacs macros I've sometimes
written but with less effort.
But it's not great either, at least for the code I write.
Warner
As for chatgpt not doing well, I suspect that is largely due to it being a
On 04/03/2025 5:37 PM EDT Chuck Guzis via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
wrote:
On 4/3/25 14:21, John Foust via cctalk wrote:
My experience has been much like John's. In my company of 10,000 ish
employees, the entire company is "strongly encouraged" to use various
"AI"
tools made available. The encouragement comes directly from the CEO (and
all his minions echo it) during his monthly video addresses.
So, all of us who write code have copilot licenses and they actually track
how much we use it (can you say layoff? I knew you could.) What I have
found is that the short suggestions of a half dozen lines or more are often
pretty good. It's the bad ones I have to fight the system to NOT take that
eat up the time. I usually could have just written those half dozen lines
faster. But sometimes it helps a lot. Apparently it tracks names and kind
find the correct variable or constant faster than I could. A couple of
coworkers have given a good description: good for boilerplate code.
At 10:22 PM 4/1/2025, Chuck Guzis via cctalk
wrote:
In another task where I wanted to quickly
generate a text-based
profile of a computer's specifications and components, it was very
helpful in writing a bunch of PowerShell. Did it hallucinate?
Perhaps once out of several dozen things I asked it, and in that
case, it was easy to see that the two clauses of the if-then were
the same.
Interesting. I got no help at all from ChatGPT when working through
some IBM 7090 code.
--Chuck
general purpose "question answerer" rather
than a tool specifically for
programming. I know of at least one person who did, however, get hired
based mostly on code written by chatgpt. But he didn't last long.
Will