August 2023 check-in — what is different in your approach in the ChatGPT, Copilot, etc. era of development?
If not much has changed, speak to that.
August 2023 check-in — what is different in your approach in the ChatGPT, Copilot, etc. era of development?
If not much has changed, speak to that.
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
Suraj Vishwakarma -
Nomadev -
Nevo David -
Julian Delerme -
Once suspended, ben will not be able to comment or publish posts until their suspension is removed.
Once unsuspended, ben will be able to comment and publish posts again.
Once unpublished, all posts by ben will become hidden and only accessible to themselves.
If ben is not suspended, they can still re-publish their posts from their dashboard.
Once unpublished, this post will become invisible to the public and only accessible to Ben Halpern.
They can still re-publish the post if they are not suspended.
Thanks for keeping DEV Community safe. Here is what you can do to flag ben:
Unflagging ben will restore default visibility to their posts.
Top comments (33)
It hasn't. I've seen a lot of developers leaning on chat GPT as a crutch. Their first instinct as soon as they get stuck rather than figuring something out is to go on ChatGPT and have it answer the solution for them. The problem is a lot of the time the answers it gives are incorrect or error prone and the very same Devs using it as a crutch don't know how to tweak the answers to actually get a working and useable solution. I tried GitHub co-pilot but didn't end up paying after the trial as I found as a .Net developer the tooling and auto complete within Visual Studio and Visual Studio code made development a lot more efficient than using any AI linked tools. I'd agree with a lot of the sentiment on here that AI ik general is overhyped at the moment and not all that it's cracked up to be.
I feel auto-pilot is giving more mistaken auto completetions than what i actually need. It has caused me again review the code again rather than go with flow that i actually already had in mind.
you’re right on this
👍
I cant tell you how many times gpt has given me incorrect code or answers. I have realized that it is over-hyped and still needs a lot of work before it becomes a useful tool for my development. I do look forward to a time where I can give AI a system spec and it will build it out for me and then I can work on it and ask the AI to build out new features. I am so tired of writing the same code over and over again, its boring now, i cant wait for advancements.
why
and drilling further and further down on a problem is really revolutionary. I am 100% on board the AI coding hype train. Its like a more personal google search and its awesomeSeconded. Being able to drill down and keep asking why efficiently is a game changer for me.
Being able to ask why Is it for me too
+1. The keep asking why did it for me too.
Did u use chatgpt 3 or 4?
I use chatgpt 3.5, which is the included under the free tier
If you have the wherewithal to get 4, give it a try. It’s hallucinations are much less common and it’s error rates in coding discussions are much less frequent.
I'll start the conversation with my experience:
I'm very curious by your last statement.
It's been 4 months since I started using github copilot. I use it mainly to develop a personal design system in sveltekit (html, css, typescript).
It helped me a lot when doing repetitive tasks. Like for example, I started writing css variables like :
And the prompt automatically completed for me the secondary, success, danger, warning and info.
When I started doing a btn class :
It took the template and used it for all the other variables.
I also used it for a small symfony (PHP) project. I started writing the controllers. When I moved on to the tests, copilot wrote lots of basic tests (some with dataProvider). I only had to tweak them a bit or to add edge cases tests.
In the end, I find it very useful for redundant tasks. And as an autocomplete on steroids. I don't think I used it in other use cases.
I don't use chatGPT, and I use very lighlty Google Bard to sometime get a help writing documentation or when I don't want to Lorem Ipsum my interfaces.
I feel GitHub Copilot accelerates me a lot and it does change how I go about coding. I will often pause and wait for it to auto-complete something, where I wouldn't have before. Sometimes it generates code that isn't quite what I would write, but as long as it's good code I will leave it alone. I never accept bad code from it, or code I don't understand.
I don't use ChatGPT very often, but it's in my toolbox now as a method of last resort. If I look at documentation and use my noggin and I still can't figure something out, I'll ask ChatGPT and sometimes as if by magic it understands my question and knows a great solution. So it's just one more resource for me, but it can be a pretty powerful one sometimes.
AI has dramatically impacted the way I troubleshoot and transform API responses in the Integration space. Although it is far from being able to develop scalable and efficient technical solutions on it's own, it assists me in minor tasks such as script development and enhancements.
Have included it in my workflow for some time. Useful so long as you understand its limits and respect that it lies like a weasel when it reaches the limit of its abilities. Always double check generated code, and learn from it rather than cut and paste. May not be replacing developers yet, but is pretty impressive.
🤓 Personal side projects
I use chat-GPT on free tiers for dummy questions that help me save a lot of time
🤵♂️ Pro
We use GH Copilot, for now mostly for programmers and data-science & engineering.
As we use it, we tend to make better comments to get better results... and the question on maintaning documentation started to raise, especially this one :
Also, reading this book brought me a lot of inspiration around this topic, which helped imagine the future of programmers work at the AGI era:
I've started out mostly using it for refactoring smaller chunks of code - first explaining what I want to do, then pasting my current code. From there, I test it and review it to see if it actually does what I want, and if it is, in fact, a better written/more condensed version of my original. I may ask them to rewrite it and see some additional options. I probably use their suggestions about 1/3rd of the time.
I primarily use it for
It really helps me to wrap up work faster and close my laptop sooner
I'm a fan of the new custom instructions in chatgpt. I wish the text were longer and I could paste huge instructions there.
I don't use AIs at all. It's a lot faster and less error prone to rtfm and do things my own way than prompt an AI.
Also really tired of all this hype and huge amounts of AI-generated content.
AI fatigue is real 😅
It's taken a lot of boring tasks off my plate, but I still have to oversee it pretty tightly — which isn't that much better. I can't say I'm actually more productive, but I don't want to dismiss what the next gen will bring.
Despite being an experienced developer, my life has been affected. I use both ChatGPT and Copilot. In some cases ChatGPT helps a lot, for example, when integrating third-party services. You can read less documentation, just feed ChatGPT documentation and write where you want to integrate, for example NextJs.
Capailot impressed me a lot in the beginning, now it doesn't provide many solutions, mostly it helps to add some trivial things like imports.
To be honest, it really saves a lot of time for me. The only thing is that I have to keep in mind that the code writing techniques is aligned with the project I am contributing to or building. I basically look into the crux idea how AI solves the issue I want to solve and get idea from their code. Other than that I have to write my own code. But anyways, this only saves a lot of time for me. At least 3 times faster development.