Chatgpt and Programming

Craig321 said:
I think it will take longer than people think to actually replace developers. I believe it will be a long time before AI can actually think and reason. What we're seeing now is a very powerful predictive text system, not actual machine intelligence. Don't get me wrong, I think generative AI will, and has already, changed the way a developer works. It will make us more productive. Junior developers will still exist, but their job will look/feel different.

Actual AGI is also extremely scary if you really think about it.
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I know people like to dismiss LLMs as just predictive text systems, but saying the neural models being created inside them as just text prediction doesn't do them justice at all. Quite interesting article the other day that a LLM was being tested on some data, and it figured out it was probably being tested based on the data it was being fed.

Basically, just because the means of communicating with the NN is through a natural language interface that is predicting the next word, doesn't mean the NN itself can't continue to evolve and display intelligence as the network grows larger and more complex.

Ultimately, any NN has to have physical IO, be it a text interface, camera (eye), other senses, temperature, sound etc.
 
mid_gen said:
I know people like to dismiss LLMs as just predictive text systems, but saying the neural models being created inside them as just text prediction doesn't do them justice at all. Quite interesting article the other day that a LLM was being tested on some data, and it figured out it was probably being tested based on the data it was being fed.

Basically, just because the means of communicating with the NN is through a natural language interface that is predicting the next word, doesn't mean the NN itself can't continue to evolve and display intelligence as the network grows larger and more complex.

Ultimately, any NN has to have physical IO, be it a text interface, camera (eye), other senses, temperature, sound etc.
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I’m not dismissing them at all, I understand there is and will be a lot more going on than predictive text, just saying there’s a really long way to go before they can actually replace a developer and I don’t believe it’s going to be only 10-15 years before 99% of the ‘average’ programmers are replaced.
 
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I had an interesting one with the much maligned DPD AI support chatbot the other day - I had a parcel where the sender had incorrectly entered the address - the house name was in the county part of the address and the house name just a -. First two attempted drops the drivers just went to the postcode and went "meh" and failed it without even trying to figure it out. Tried with human support and just getting replies of "Sorry we can't change the address for this consignment" or "Sorry we don't allow customers to contact the driver" with a failure to recognise the problem or what I was actually asking, seeming to just react to key words in the query.

Thought I had nothing to lose putting the same description of the issue to the AI chat, just describing the issue and not suggesting how to resolve it, and it came straight back with something like "Is this correct I can add a delivery note for the driver that the house name is wrong in the address and to use X instead?" and it was sorted. It would have to have at least some interpretive ability rather than just complex key word matching to have figured out the slightly less straight forward course of action.
 
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Rroff said:
I had an interesting one with the much maligned DPD AI support chatbot the other day - I had a parcel where the sender had incorrectly entered the address - the house name was in the county part of the address and the house name just a -. First two attempted drops the drivers just went to the postcode and went "meh" and failed it without even trying to figure it out. Tried with human support and just getting replies of "Sorry we can't change the address for this consignment" or "Sorry we don't allow customers to contact the driver" with a failure to recognise the problem or what I was actually asking, seeming to just react to key words in the query.

Thought I had nothing to lose putting the same description of the issue to the AI chat, just describing the issue and not suggesting how to resolve it, and it came straight back with something like "Is this correct I can add a delivery note for the driver that the house name is wrong in the address and to use X instead?" and it was sorted. It would have to have at least some interpretive ability rather than just complex key word matching to have figured out the slightly less straight forward course of action.
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That's both very cool and annoying!
While this seems like a simple case of changing a field in a delivery address, it's not always going to be and might not be simply because of the way the system was designed in the first place.

This has likely been bolted on to a mixture of new and legacy software with very limited access to control that system.
 
It’s not the best for platform specific requests, I still end up spending time on Google for things like Magento errors but I do use it on the daily.

For common languages like js, php, ruby, go etc etc, it’s brilliant.

If I need any data work done for example, I can get a script written in Go in a fraction of the usual time.
 
shifty_uk said:
It’s not the best for platform specific requests, I still end up spending time on Google for things like Magento errors but I do use it on the daily.

For common languages like js, php, ruby, go etc etc, it’s brilliant.

If I need any data work done for example, I can get a script written in Go in a fraction of the usual time.
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Indeed. I use it regularly for php scripts, even really basic scripts it does much quicker than me (though I'm not professionally trained in any language) it's incredible how much quicker and easier it is to use chatgpt, and often ti's tidier too than what I'd write.
 
unwashed potato! said:
Indeed. I use it regularly for php scripts, even really basic scripts it does much quicker than me (though I'm not professionally trained in any language) it's incredible how much quicker and easier it is to use chatgpt, and often ti's tidier too than what I'd write.
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I’ve just started a small personal project in rails as a learning exercise and its hard not to rely it :o
 
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I wrote an Android app about 6 or 7 years ago, that is getting rather out dated, but I've not kept up with Android's changes and had wondered about re-writing it in Kotlin. I just tried asking Gemini toi write code in Kotlin to allow someone to sign in using their Google Account and it looks quite comprehensive, giving the code and explaining what each bit does. Then at the end it sites its sources (mainly Stack Overflow!)

I'm hoping to start some kind of Kotlin course, but it looks like AI could really help me. So, which is best (free) AI for coding?
 
Craig321 said:
Also now a daily user of ChatGPT, with a paid subscription. Well worth the money IMO considering the increase in productivity and knowledge.
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Same here. I also you Github Copilot with Visual Studio Code. Well worth the monthly fee in terms of time it has saved me searching for answers to problems.
 
Ah yeah, I wish! But my work has some or other issue with Copilot at the moment so we're not getting that yet and it's not something you can buy your own licence for to use at work really.
 
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I've subscribed to cursor recently. I could build something bare bones and was pretty impressed. However when pushed against a bigger repo - it absolutely goes bonkers and starts to fix unrelated items. With enough back and forth - it did identify the issue , but it was comical to see - it was wrong at least the first 5-6 changes it made, once it started debugging it it got more methodical. Fun tool.
 
I'm finding I'm using this constantly now for php/jquery coding. I want something made for the website. I give chatgpt a brief and it does it, but best of all, it's learnt how my site and other parts of the code are, partly because it's made enough of them, that now when I want something added, it already knows simply things like the variable names etc.

One thing I do notice is the difference between the 2 versions I'm getting as a free user. I guess I get a dumbed down version after so many questions. It kind of feels like having a technician in the phone that ends their shift and then a dummy takes over, and then a few hours later when I get the better version back, it's noticeably better.

Is the paid for version the same as the free good version I get, or is it even better?

Is chatgpt the best for coding questions (only ever php, mysql and query related) or would another service be better?
 
mid_gen said:
Got a private Copilot service now at work and I'm using it more and more, odds and sods like writing regex and reminding myself of some obscure syntax I've not used in a while.

So much better than just searching. I believe we're getting models trained on our engines at some point which will be ace for doing boilerplate.
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Same, got an internal one currently in beta that is trained on stuff that will always be internal.
 
It's used a lot amongst the juniors in my dept. You can always tell generated code as it has so many unrequired statements and around-the-houses way of doing things. The mid and senior level guys either hide it better, or know enough to re-write ChatGPT code properly :cry:
 
Craig321 said:
Also now a daily user of ChatGPT, with a paid subscription. Well worth the money IMO considering the increase in productivity and knowledge.
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It's pretty easy to run your own LLMs locally, especially if you have a beefy GPU.

I am just running qwen2.5coder:1.5b as the autocomplete model on my 4070, it's quite happy. I need the rest of the GPU for other stuff as I'm in gamedev, but you can easily run bigger models if you don't need the VRAM for anything else.

I use Ollama and Continue.dev plugins for Jetbrains Rider.
 
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