This week I had a couple of things I got stuck on and googling/Stack Overflow weren’t helping me much. I know that people have said that AI can help you with programming and I thought I’d see how much help it was getting me unstuck.
Problem 1
I went a few rounds with it coming up with suggestion that sounded reasonable, but none of them helped. Although I found that telling it exactly what wasn’t working helped me to establish what the problem actually was.
Sadly, though, it then started giving me code where I couldn’t see what it had changed. When I asked, it told me it had added a function. But that function was already there… At that point it become clear that it wasn’t going to be of any more help and I gave up.
Problem 2
This started similarly, with it coming up with reasonable-sounding explanations and suggestions, none of which solved the problem. And then it started giving me links to CodePens it had created. All of which were empty. When I asked it apologised and gave me a new link. Which was also empty. It did also give me all the code that would be in the CodePen, so it didn’t matter too much.
But since we weren’t solving the problem I asked it where it had got its answers from. It initially refused to give me any links until I persisted. And then it gave me StackOverflow links to completely different problems in completely different languages…
When I called it on that it told me what to search for on StackOverflow (and how to search StackOverflow). They were reasonable search strings, even if they didn’t lead to to anything I hadn’t already come across.
Conclusion
If I was merely judging it on those two interactions then I’d say it was completely useless. Plus every time it gives an answer it started by telling me I was right which got grating after a while. But I already knew it did that sort of thing and can’t be turned off. I also hate that it shows you its answer one line at a time, but I’d already asked it about that and it also can’t be turned off.
So it’s annoying, but I’m not totally giving up on it. I have heard from people that it can be good for giving you starter code that you can improve on. And there may be less complex problems that it will be better at finding answers for.
I also only tried ChatGPT - it may be that some of the others are less annoying and/or more useful.
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