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Andrew Savetchuk
Andrew Savetchuk

Posted on • Updated on • Originally published at blog.savetchuk.com

ChatGPT Is Still Not Good Enough

Some people have told me that they fear that ChatGPT (and AI in general) will take over the developer's jobs. I honestly do not see how this can happen (at least in the next 5-10 years) and I believe that AI tools are only tools that can help developers work more efficiently. Can it change in the future? Sure, but it will not happen soon.

Whenever I hear that ChatGPT is going to take someone's place, I encourage people to try actively using ChatGPT for at least a week. I do use it more often than Google, and while it helps to find the right information without annoying ads, it still often gives me incorrect answers to simple questions.

For example, here is me asking ChatGPT how to add a multi-select option to Choices.js (a JavaScript library I use in a Laravel project to make custom selectors).

Example of incorrect response from ChatGPT

As you can see, ChatGPT suggested that I should add multiple: true to the configuration object. I tried and it did not work. Instead, I decided to add the multiple property to the HTML tag itself and it did the trick (<select multiple...>).

Next, I wanted to be able to unselect some previously selected options, but the "X" button I expected to see did not appear. So I asked ChatGPT again.

Example of incorrect response from ChatGPT 2

Example of incorrect response from ChatGPT 3

As with the previous question, this time I got the wrong answer again. Even though the given piece of code is complete and works, it is not the piece I asked for.

Let's see one more example when ChatGPT gave me the correct answer, but in my opinion, the answer could be a bit better.

Example of correct response from ChatGPT

I asked ChatGPT to instantiate the date in Laravel, add 30 days to it, and display it in the following format: 13/2/2023. The code ChatGPT gave me this time was correct, however, Laravel has a now() helper that you can use instead of Carbon\Carbon::now() which I think makes your code cleaner. If I did not know about the shorthand, I would have had to write more code. It would be great if AI tools like ChatGPT offered you multiple solutions and explained the benefits and differences of each.

As of 2023, ChatGPT is pretty much the same tool as Google or StackOverflow, but without the ads (I wonder how long it will stay this way though). I do realize that the model will learn and grow over time, but I wonder if it could keep up with the latest technology trends in the future. For now, it works just well, periodically giving wrong responses, but still not good enough to give up other tools such as old but good StackOverflow.


The end, I hope this information was helpful, stay tuned for more content :)

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