Re:Claude 3 beats GPT-4 on Aider's code editing benchmark
by Balgair on Wednesday March 27, 2024 @03:43PM
(#39843679)
I mean, I'm not so much of a programmer as a person that can hack together code. Granted, my job is not 'programmer', it's 'R&D'.
For example, I had to patch together some excel files the other day. Data in one file referenced data in ~60 other files in a pretty complicated way, but a standardized one. About 80,000 rows needed to be processed across 60,000 columns. Not terrible, not fun though.
Now, I'm good at excel, but not VBA good. And I'm a 'D-' in python. Passing, but barely. Writing a python program to do the job would take me about a full work day, likely two.
But, when I fired up GPT3.5 (I'm a schlub, I know!) and typed in the request, I got a pretty good working answer in about, ohhh, 15 seconds. Sure, it didn't work the first time, but I was able to hack at it, iterate with GPT3.5 only twice, and I got my work done just fine. Total time? About 15 minutes. Likely a 64X increase in productivity.
So, maybe when we say that our programming is improved, what we actually mean is that our productivity is improved, not our innate abilities to program.
For example, I had to patch together some excel files the other day. Data in one file referenced data in ~60 other files in a pretty complicated way, but a standardized one. About 80,000 rows needed to be processed across 60,000 columns. Not terrible, not fun though.
Now, I'm good at excel, but not VBA good. And I'm a 'D-' in python. Passing, but barely. Writing a python program to do the job would take me about a full work day, likely two.
But, when I fired up GPT3.5 (I'm a schlub, I know!) and typed in the request, I got a pretty good working answer in about, ohhh, 15 seconds. Sure, it didn't work the first time, but I was able to hack at it, iterate with GPT3.5 only twice, and I got my work done just fine. Total time? About 15 minutes. Likely a 64X increase in productivity.
So, maybe when we say that our programming is improved, what we actually mean is that our productivity is improved, not our innate abilities to program.