Asklemmy

Not really, it's been pretty useless for me. But I'm also a very senior developer, I've been coding for 18 years so more often than not I'm stuck on a problem much bigger than the best AI can possibly handle, just in amount of context needed to find out what's wrong.

It's still much faster for me to just write the code than to explain what I want to an AI. IDE snippets and completion just makes it super quick. Writing out code is not a bottleneck for me, if anything I shit out code and shell commands without a thought. It comes out like it's regular speech.

I'm also at a point where I Google things out, and end up answering myself 5 years ago, or asking 5 years ago and there's still zero answers to the question.

I do see my juniors using Copilot a good bit though.

AI chatbots are sometimes quicker than using official library documentation. I daresay usually quicker, for anything but documentation that I know really well already.

I haven't spent my own money on a development tool in a long time, but I find it worth a few of my employer's dollars.

It's hardly life-changing, but it's convenient.

I can't comment on it's mistakes or hallucinations, because I am a godlike veteran programmer - I can exit Vim - and so I - so far - have immediately recognized when the AI is off track, and have been able to trivially guide it back toward the solution I'm looking for.

I’ve found it almost uniformly useless. Dangerous, even, because it produces output that looks good at first glance. But it only understands the line I typed and tries to figure out what I’m likely to keep typing. It doesn’t have a clue what problem I’m solving, what domain I’m working in, the scope I’m concerned with, and myriad other things that are what is actually important when writing software.

The one area I’ve found it useful is turning code comments into real code. If I’m coding in a language I’m not super familiar with, I can pseudo code what I’m trying to do in descriptive comments and it will often suggest a block of code that follows coding conventions and does what I asked for. Is it better than just learning the damn language? No. But it’s a handy tool to have for that one time a year I need to touch that program written in Go.

Yes and no. I compare it to a graphing calculator: I know how to graph a parabola by hand already, but I don’t want to have to do it over and over already. That’s just busy work for me.

LLMs are similar that way. There’s often a lot of boilerplate to get out of the way that’s just busy work to write over and over again. LLMs are great at generating some of that scaffolding.

LLMs have also become a lot more helpful as Google search has gotten worse over time.

Yep! It’s the best autocorrect I’ve ever used, and it does a decent job explaining config files when needed. Just don’t let any unvetted code in because it can have some quirky bugs

Depends on if you want to work with existing code. LLMs tend to be good at generating small code snippets but not good at understanding / finding errors in existing code

Absolutely. I just built a little proof of concept thing where I loaded some GIS data into a google map to display the major rivers of the world.

ChatGPT, the v4 that I pay $20/mo for, was like someone with deep knowledge of all the technologies and APIs involved.

I’m gonna post a link to screenshots of the convo so you can see exactly how it went.

Not really. Writing code is the easy part. It's not the rate limiting step. The hard part is getting requirements out of customers, who rarely know what they want. I don't need to push out more code and features faster, that would make things into unmaintainable spaghetti.

I might send it a feature list and ask it "what features did they forget?" or "Can you suggest more features?", or even better -- "which features are the least important for X and can be eliminated?". In other words, let it do the job of middle-management and I'll just do the coding myself.

Anyway, ChatGPT blocks my country (I've confirmed it's on their end).

I tried to use Copilot but it just kept getting in the way. The advanced autofill was nice sometimes, but its not like i'm making a list of countries or some mock data that often...

As far as generated code... especially with html/css/js frontend code it consistently output extremely inaccessible code. Which is baffling considering how straightforward the MDN, web.dev, and WCAG docs are. (Then again, LLMs cant really understand when an inaccessable pattern is used to demonstrate an onclick instead of a semantic a or to explain aria-* attributes...)

It was so bad so often that I dont use it much for languages I'm unfamiliar with either. If it puts out garbage where i'm an expert, i dont want to be responsible for it when I have no knowledge.

I might consider trying a LLM thats much more tuned to a single languge or purpose. I don't really see these generalized ones being popular long run, especially once the rose-tinted glasses come off.

I mostly use shell-gpt and ask it trivial questions. Saves me the time for switching to a browser. I have it always running in a tmux pane. As for code, I found it helpful for getting started when writing a functionality, but the actual engineering part should be done manually imo. As for spending money on it, depends on how you benifit from it. I spend about 50c on my openai API key, but I know a friend who used ollama (I think with some mistral derivative) locally on a gaming laptop with decent enough results.

After I write code, I pass it through Claude for "review". But normally I write the code by myself.

It’s sometimes helpful when working with libraries that are not well documented. Or to write some very barebones and not super useful tests if I’m that lazy. But I’m not going to let it code for me. The results suck and I don’t want to become a „prompt engineer“.

More of a hobbyist, but it helps finding that typo I've made earlier that went unnoticed. And for command-line utilities it's nice being able to ask what you want to do and it provides the parameters you're looking for right away.

Basically made stack overflow useless for me. Great for pasting error messages. I don’t really find it useful for actually writing the code tho, unless its standard boilerplate stuff.

It's a decent general purpose data formatter (like "convert this giant json to yaml") but there are other ways to do that.

It's ok at being able to ask questions of documentation, as long as you don't take anything at face value. Really if you understand 90% of something its not bad at giving you the missing 10%. And it makes me a bit faster when I go back to bash, the anti-bicycle, after a break.

And I find myself not writing as many IDE snippets because AI is good at super repetitive stuff like, "wrap this promise in an async function." That's not the best example but it's what I could think of quickly.

I’ve had the most luck with using ChatGPT for troubleshooting my existing code. I typically tend to lean more towards creative coding, and can provide it with my source code and a casual explanation of the issue and it can often explain how to manipulate things in a way I want.

I’ve relied on it a lot less for code generation and found it to be much more useful as a tutor for concepts that I can rework myself. I haven’t spent much time with Copilot since most of my projects are aiming for an uncommon goal.

Where I’ve found it to be less than useful in code generation is I’ll get caught in a loop where it’s trying an approach I’m not familiar with, so I feed it back the errors I’m getting and hoping it can solve it on its own, but it rarely is able to.

I don’t code professionally, but I’d probably hesitate to use it for anything used in production just based on what I’ve experienced.

I've used chagpt and google's new one, whose name eludes me.

In cases where I absolutely have to write in a language or structure I hate, I prototype in an A-I to speed up the experience so I can stop sooner. It saves me so much time doing something I hate.

I'm a new DM (and new to TTRPGs in general). I'm using bard and chatgpt to keep track of homebrew stuff.

I'm running an almost completely custom system, adapted to ASOIAF. Races (renamed to origins), classes, backgrounds, feats, etc. extra mechanics like duelling systems and large battle simulations, and faction interaction systems. It's a lot, and I find it easier for me to have the bot spray solutions to whatever issue I run into, then grab the one that might work, and refine it until it might sound fun. I need to get a system in order to keep track of my campaign, though. Tried WorldAnvil and honestly, I don't need that many tools. Might go back to Notion and keep track of all the factions and characters that way. Gonna be a lot of work though.

Yes, it's extremely powerful. For example I recently had an idea for a script to merge cbz files into a single document so I wouldn't have to clutter my ereader with many individual chapters. The LLM had almost no issue writing the whole thing with only one revision, spent less time and thought on that than I did googling around to see if there were existing solutions. It's really nice being able to create programs like that just on the high level concept and without mentally getting into the weeds of implementation details. If I wrote it myself I would have had to refresh my memory on stuff like regex and sorting syntax and it would have been way more time and effort. It basically lets me write custom scripts for any trivial problem where they could be useful where otherwise it might be too much trouble.