Do chatgpt or other language models help you code more efficiently and faster? Is it worth spending your money for it?

  • @kromem
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    10 months ago

    The chatbot version? Meh, sometimes, but I don’t use it often.

    The IDE integrated autocompletion?

    I’ll stab the MFer that tries to take that away.

    So much time saved for things that used to just be the boring busywork parts of coding.

    And while it doesn’t happen often, the times it preempts my own thinking for what to do next is magic feeling.

    I often use the productivity hack of leaving a comment for what I’m doing next when I start my next day, and it’s very cool when I sit down to start work and see a completion that’s 80% there. Much faster to get back into the flow.

    I will note that I use it in a mature codebase, so it matches my own style and conventions. I haven’t really used it in fresh projects.

    Also AMAZING when working with popular APIs or libraries I’m adding in for the first time.

    Edit: I should also note that I have over a decade of experience, so when it gets things wrong it’s fairly obvious and easily fixed. I can’t speak to how useful or harmful it would be as a junior dev. I will say that sometimes when it is wrong it’s because it is trying to follow a more standard form of a naming convention in my code vs an exception, and I have even ended up with some productive refractors prompted by its mistakes.

      • @kromem
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        210 months ago

        Visual Studio.

        And yeah, forget where I picked up the “leave the function unfinished with a comment” trick but it’s been a great way to jump back in.