this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2024
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Wow, the text generator that doesn't actually understand what it's "writing" is making mistakes? Who could have seen that coming?
I once asked one to write a basic 50-line Python program (just to flesh things out), and it made so many basic errors that any first-year CS student could catch. Nobody should trust LLMs with anything related to security, FFS.
My experience with ChatGPT goes like this:
I interviewed someone who used AI (CoPilot, I think), and while it somewhat worked, it gave the wrong implementation of a basic algorithm. We pointed out the mistake, the developer fixed it (we had to provide the basic algorithm, which was fine), and then they refactored and AI spat out the same mistake, which the developer again didn't notice.
AI is fine if you know what you're doing and can correct the mistakes it makes (i.e. use it as fancy code completion), but you really do need to know what you're doing. I recommend new developers avoid AI like the plague until they can use it to cut out the mundane stuff instead of filling in their knowledge gaps. It'll do a decent job at certain prompts (i.e. generate me a function/class that...), but you're going to need to go through line-by-line and make sure it's actually doing the right thing. I find writing code to be much faster than reading and correcting code so I don't bother w/ AI, but YMMV.
An area where it's probably ideal is finding stuff in documentation. Some projects are huge and their search sucks, so being able to say, "find the docs for a function in library X that does..." I know what I want, I just may not remember the name or the module, and I certainly don't remember the argument order.
AI is like having an intern you can delegate to. If you give it a simple enough task with clear direction, it can come up with something useful, but you need to check.