I struggle to understand what exactly people are coding up where ChatGPT actually saves them a lot of time. Is it just generic stuff that would have already been copy/pasted from stackoverflow?

I wonder how many of those people would just benefit from better auto-complete like copilot + learning how to read documentation properly.

I wanted to enhance a python script that organizes my photo library to include a fuzzy city name in the name of the folder. E.g. changing from ./2023/2023-03/2023-03-03_18-29-32.jpg to ./2023/2023-03/San_Francisco/2023-03-03_18-29-32.jpg, where the city name is pulled from the lat/long in the EXIF and then looked up online. I asked ChatGPT one "chunk" at a time, and all of the suggestions it came up with needed some probing and clarifications, but got to a working solution a lot quicker that piecing together random snippets from stack overflow (I am not a python programmer).

It translates curl calls to python requests very well. Also things like "wrap this piece of long running code and show a progress bar" and similar low level stuff.

You are right that it's absolutely possible to figure all this using google and documentation. But do you really want to spend X minutes googling for the correct python module and then figuring out ho to use it? When you can just show it your code and ask it to update it in seconds? It's like you have someone at your side who has already been there and figured out the answer for you.

IDEA's autocomplete was consistently better and more useful for me than Copilot. I think that out of the 5, maybe 10 times when it managed to autocomplete something, it was correct maybe once.

It will may be better on less idiosyncratic code base than the one I was working on, but at one point I just turned it off completely.

It doesn’t matter? It’s a tool, you need to learn how to use it, understand its limitations.

I used chatgpt today to save minutes of my life having it rewrite code from one language to another. Could I have googled the syntax of both, remember how, why , etc. transcribed it to another language, sure. Chat gpt did this in seconds.

I've found it particularly good at translating from one language to another. It will even recognize limitations and dependencies. For example, I asked it to translate some Javascript code (with a UI) into Julia. It said something to the effect of "You can't manipulate the DOM directly in Julia, but we can use GTK.jl to create a GUI". The resulting code needed some work (I'd be surprised if it didn't) but for the most part the structure was there and the needed changes were pretty easy to see.

For some types of code.

We translated a short bash script into windows .bat files and PowerShell.

It was so wrong with the .bat files that there wasn't a single working line in the entire script. It was 99% correct with the PowerShell code.

As a tool it is completely unreliable. But it does look like magic when it works.

No offense, but I don't think .bat files are that popular, which means ChatGPT did not see enough of them to really learn them enough.

Try asking for some Bash or Python instead and compare the results.

It does fine with bat and cmd stuff syntax. I used chat gpt today to convert a bat file that added/removed reg entries to PowerShell. You can always just ask it to write what's written in code if you describe it in English.

I dont know why people are staring this thing in the face and pretending they can do better at the first pass. I've used chat gpt to do the following so far:

1. Answer tickets that help desk spent days trying to figure out. Simply asked the bot the same question and got better results from a piece of code than our outsourced MSP. It's embarrassing, we sent the answers it gave to the techs and asked them why we need them at all, when they can't figure out why basic things don't work...

2. Asked it to write powershell, with commands no one had time to google, with try-catch logic, and less than 5 minutes put it into production

3. Asked it to write demo C# code, which it got wrong but right enough to be helpful and move us along

4. Asked it to rewrite many of my horrible, direct emails to corporate speak so they doesn't ruffle any feathers

5. Had it write 10000-word document piece by piece, sent it to legal and received zero revisions, all I provided was a narrative and some connecting sentences and questions.

6. Rewrite so many memos

7. Write thank you emails

8. Write performance reviews, by taking one and rephrasing over and over based on minor adjustments like, more direct, less direct, more fluff, less fluff

9. I am not a native speaker, chat gpt often gets it wrong but, often it makes my two sentence emails just perfect

10. Had it take various compliance tests...

Maybe ya'll are super geniuses but based on my observations over the past 15 years, the bot does better than I'd wager %70+ of the people I've ever met, interacted with, depended on or managed professionally. Its not moody, it doesnt catch feeling when its told that it is wrong, and is predictably wrong when you expect it to fail, it great at generating corporate bs speak, pleasantries, projecting forcefulness, explaining condensed thinking in words that non-tech people can absorb, etc.

It's like the universal translator from star trek version 0.000000001 for me for the metric ton of BS that I deal with on a daily basis. I get better results out of the thing than out of most people I currently have to direct.

> I dont know why people are staring this thing in the face and pretending they can do better at the first pass.

Because we also tried it and found it severely lacking?

For purely "literary" endeavors like corporate speak, and writing texts within certain stylistic templates it is really good

Exactly. Messages, briefs, reports etc.., are usually great.

Programming? It mostly gets very close to the correct solution, but you still need to be careful.

FWIW I made a CLI utility that does this, it saves a bit typing / copy-pasting. More languages can be added easily: https://github.com/clevercli/clevercli#built-in-prompts

Doesn't lying require moral agency? To say that an LLM is lying is to suggest that it intends to deceive you. That's anthropomorhizing.

that sounds like a very intersting comment in an entirely different conversation.

lying here just means spitting out falsehoods

So are StackOverflow answers. When I look at something on StackOverflow, I am expected to use my expertise and the context of my work to adapt the collection of answers to what I'm working on. StackOverflow doesn't tell me anything I could not have figured out on my own, but searching through some library's source code to find under which situations an error can occur isn't always a good use of my time. ChatGPT fills a similar role. I type into it, much like how I would with Google, get some output, validate it, and adapt it to the specific problem I'm addressing.

> So are StackOverflow answers.

You don't embrace SO overlords though ;) Meanwhile with ChatGPT and Copilot people are losing their minds it seems. I've yet to find them useful for anything beyond mere curiosities and one-off queries like improving corporate-sounding texts.

>You don't embrace SO overlords though

I mean, don't we? The number of times I've heard SWE humorously defined as "people who copy and paste from Stackoverflow"...

(My favorite: https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/03/31/the-key-copy-paste/)