AI used extremely sparingly is sometimes helpful to an experienced coder. "Multivac, generate a set of unit tests for this function." Okay, some of these are dumb, but it's easier getting started on this mess than just looking at a blank buffer. Helps get the juices flowing a bit. But man, you try to actually do anything with it, and suddenly you're lost chasing a will-o'-wisp.

[–] craftrabbit@lemmy.zip 13 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Oh man, I love ChatGPT for one thing in particular: "Hey chatbot, is there some library or standard library function for that very specific, yet still kinda generic thing I'm trying to do, so that I don't have to write it myself?"

It does frequently give a helpful answer. That is, it doesn't give me working code, but a helpful pointer to some manual where I can find good instructions for how to use the thing to solve my problem.

[–] mutant_zz@lemmy.world 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I will usually google that kind of thing first (to save the rainforests)... Often I can find something that way, otherwise I might try an LLM

[–] craftrabbit@lemmy.zip 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

True that. But I often find that the search engine is not very good at giving me a solution if I don't know the name of a problem and only have my spaghetti thoughts on what the thing is supposed to do, and translating spaghetti thoughts into something a search engine can find is where the chatbot excels.

[–] SparroHawc@lemmy.zip 2 points 3 days ago

Part of your trouble there is that Google is absolute dog shit these days. It used to be like magic; simple search terms would find you exactly what you were looking for in the first handful of results. Now you're lucky to find it on the second page.