Comment AI is very good, but not great at programming (Score 1) 73
I've been programming computers in one capacity or another for decades. I've done everything from Apple Basic to Visual Basic, with C, C++, Objective C, Java, HTML/CSS/JavaScript, Python, PHP & MySQL in between, plus several others that don't merit mention here.
I have to do some programming in my job, but it is only a small part. I administer several different cloud services, so I have to deal with a lot of APIs. Sometimes the particular action I'm looking to perform is not intuitive. It is much easier for me to pass the API Doc URL to ChatGPT, tell it what I want it to do, and have it write an initial Python script for me.
I still have to debug it and give that back to ChatGPT for revision. Eventually, I get to the solution, usually in less than half the time it would have taken me to bang out the code myself. It's nice to have it automatically insert comments and add debugging messages to the terminal and to a log.
The thing is, you still need to know what you're doing. Sometimes it writes rather inefficient algorithms, and I've caught it a few times in off by 1 errors. You can't just have a person without programming experience use it and expect it to be successful.