• ggppjj@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I’m a self-taught C# dev, I’ve found tremendous success specifically just describing what I want to do in dumb language that I’d feel stupid asking people IRL about and that aren’t googleable without knowing what both the terms “null-coalescing” and “non-merchandise supergroup” are describing.

    There are a lot of patterns that don’t have obvious names and that aren’t easily described without describing a specific scenario in a way that might only make sense institutionally, or with additional context that your average person might not have. ChatGPT is fairly good at being the “buddy that you have a bunch of in-jokes with that can remember things better than you”. I can skip a lot of explaining why I need to do a thing a certain way like I can with my coworkers (who all aren’t programmers), and I can get helpful answers for programming questions that my coworkers don’t know the answers to.

    It’s frustrating to see this incredibly advanced context-aware autocorrect on steroids get used in ways that don’t acknowledge the inherent strengths of what LLMs are actually great at doing. It’s infuriating to have that potential be actively misused and packaged as a service and have that mediocre service sold to you once a month as a necessity by idiots in suits watching a line on a chart.

    • peto (he/him)@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      Yeah, this is much the same kind of use. If you work on the assumption that it is just something that has read everything, and everything that has been written about everything you can find it’s utility. Folk want it to be some kind of fact genie, but the only facts it knows are what words go together, and it literally doesn’t know the difference between real and made up.