Using $technological_aide \in {chatgpt,ide,stackoverflow,google,debuggers,compilers,optimizers,high-mem VMs}$ to code is not a skill. It’s a crutch. Any employees that feel held back by not being able to access it aren’t great in the first place.
I don't think using ChatGPT is similar to searching for answers on S.O. Maybe if you were asking people on S.O. to write your code for you, or plugging in exact snippets. The point here is that letting ChatGPT write code directly into your repo is effectively plagiarism and may violate any number of licenses you don't even realize you're breaking, whereas just looking at how other people did something, understanding, and then writing your own code, does not.
Honestly I couldn’t tell you whether copying code out of Stack Overflow or out of ChatGPT is more legally suspect. For SO, you don’t know where the user got the code from either (wrote it themselves? Copied it out of their work repo? Copied from some random GPL source?)
I've been experiencing carpal tunnel on and off for a couple of weeks now.
I can tell you that reading through some code generated by "insert llm x" is substantially less painful than writing all of it by my own hand.
Especially if you start understanding how to refine your prompts to the point where you use a single thread for project management and use that thread to generate prompts for other threads.
Not all value to be gained from this is purely copypasta.
Same here. End of last year I had to take more time off than I wanted to because of my wrists and hands. Copilot and GPT4 (combined with good compression braces) got me back in the game.
Stackoverflow yes, the others aren’t the same category. Asking someone else to give you code to do X means you have struggled synthesizing algorithms yourself. It’s not a good habit because it means you struggle to be precise in how the program behaves.
I am not a programmer and only know some very rudimentary HTML and Java. After hearing everyone enthuse about how they use ChatGPT for everything, I thought that I could use it to generate a page that I thought sounded simple enough. Gist of it was that I needed 100 boxes of the same dimensions that text could be inputted into. I figured that it'd be faster with AI than with me setting up an excel sheet that others would have to access.
Instead, the AI kept spitting out slightly-off code, and no matter how much reiterations I did it did not improve. Had I known the programming language, I would have known what needed to be changed. I think that a lot of highly experienced people are using it as a short-hand to get started, and a lot of inexperienced people are going to use it to produce a lot of shoddy crap. Anyone relying on ChatGPT that doesn't already know what they're doing is setting themselves up for failure.
> said by someone who uses chatgpt extensively, it is good for the structure, to get an idea, but as a code generator it kinda sucks.
Interestingly, the same applies to text-to-image programs. Once you used these for a while, you realize their utility and value are little more than an inspiration or a starter. Even if you wanted to ignore the ethical implications, very little they produce is useable. LLM are amazing. However, their end-product application is overrated.
