As a software developer with close to 30 years of experience, I find it continually astonishing when people say LLMs are useful to them for technical stuff. I already spend too much of my life debugging code I didn’t write. I don’t need to automatically churn out more technical debt to be responsible for!
I don’t work in actual software development, though I do a little of it amongst other work.
When I need to slop out a one-time snippet or short script to do something, which I have to do like 10 times a day, it takes me like 3-20 minutes. ChatGPT 4 does it near-perfectly, takes one minute, and usually teaches me something on the way.
Plus when I need to work out how the fuck GDB works to debug shit, it’s an absolute lifesaver. The manual is very long and remembering all the memory examination commands is hard.
If you’re ever working on code over ~100 lines a long, then I basically agree as it takes massive debugging and is poorly factored to the point of being worthless. But for arcane, well-documented commands (ie obscure programming languages and linux tools), and short blasts of code, it’s genuinely incredibly useful on a daily basis.
As a software developer with close to 30 years of experience, I find it continually astonishing when people say LLMs are useful to them for technical stuff. I already spend too much of my life debugging code I didn’t write. I don’t need to automatically churn out more technical debt to be responsible for!
I don’t work in actual software development, though I do a little of it amongst other work.
When I need to slop out a one-time snippet or short script to do something, which I have to do like 10 times a day, it takes me like 3-20 minutes. ChatGPT 4 does it near-perfectly, takes one minute, and usually teaches me something on the way.
Plus when I need to work out how the fuck GDB works to debug shit, it’s an absolute lifesaver. The manual is very long and remembering all the memory examination commands is hard.
If you’re ever working on code over ~100 lines a long, then I basically agree as it takes massive debugging and is poorly factored to the point of being worthless. But for arcane, well-documented commands (ie obscure programming languages and linux tools), and short blasts of code, it’s genuinely incredibly useful on a daily basis.