On: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative A...

[yayitswei]

I agree with 5%. That said, I've found rubber duck debugging to be an exceptionally effective use case for ChatGPT. Often it will surprise me by pinpointing the solution outright, but I'll always be making progress by clarifying my own thinking.

[kromem → yayitswei]

Yeah, it's an amazing rubber duck.

Even in the IDE I'll sometimes just write comments like (arbitrary example out of thin air):

// Q: Should we use a for loop or a while loop here? // A:

It doesn't always have a great answer, but as you say, it almost always helps my own thinking about it, which is often much more valuable.

[hn_user82179 → yayitswei]

Fascinating! Can I ask how you use ChatGPT for debugging? are the bugs you've used it with more high level, "this is what's happening" kind of things? Or could you give an example?

[yayitswei → hn_user82179]

It's similar to how you would describe a problem to a coworker on Slack. I give it some context, then I state the problem or paste in the error message/stacktrace. I might also list steps that I've taken already. Then I follow ChatGPT's suggestions to troubleshoot. Sometimes I need to supplement with my own ideas, but usually that's enough to iteratively bisect the issue.

[dustymcp → hn_user82179]

just give it the log output or error code and your code then in alot of cases it comes up with decent solutions