this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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Sometimes you just need a more specific example
Which is the greatest use case for ChatGPT.
It's been a while since I picked up a new language, but I remember the last time I did, the hardest part was just figuring out how to do trivial things. It's crazy how long it took me to figure out how to do a simple thing like split a string into fields by a delimiter. I can literally paste a line of code into ChatGTP and say "convert this Python line into JavaScript" and it'll just do it. Fantastic.
Or yeah, I could spend five minutes reading the man page to remind myself of strptime's date format every time I need to format a date. Orrrrrr I can just ask the bot something like
How do I format this date to look like "YYYY-MM-DD HH-MM-SS" in python? Wed Oct 25 05:37:04 PDT 2023.Untill it completely makes up a date format that looks reasonable but won't work.I tried ChatGPT to research, in Rust, how to require at least one feature at compilation time just with Cargo.toml options. Turns out that's not supported, but that didn't prevent ChatGPT from trying to gaslight me with some hallucinations about options that would do this. It's a waste of time when you can't differentiate hallucinations from recollection, for an experienced dev parsing documentation without this uncertainty should be much more efficient.
I've definitely had it hallucinate a feature sending me on a red herring hunt on several occasions now... Sometimes I wish I'd just used StackOverflow to begin with, but then with StackOverflow I sometimes wish I'd just read the documentation to begin with.
Alas, it won't be a hit 100% of the time and will occasionally send you the long way round. Just like StackOverflow. But even despite this property, nobody would tell you to NEVER use StackOverflow because it SOMETIMES takes way too long to find the answer to a question easily glanced from the docs.