ChatGPT

So i recently got bored with our stacks (react / angular) and wanted to try out an llm as code assistant.

Not continue or cursor or copilot (i personally use zed / sublime as my text editors of choice, with no inline complete or the likes, just a formatter and a linter)

So i fired up codeqwen on one of our office boxes, and borrowed a claude opus login.

As a standin developer? They suck. Borderline bipolar.

Coding anything past the basic boilerplate turns into spaghetti real fast.

The problem is maintaining context over any length of time.

Eg. building a renderer that handles dom, but can hand off to a scenegraph in canvas (2 graphs - DOM + WebGL with one api surface)

Where opus really shines is code review. It "understands" code really well. Qwen generates jsdocs well, and they both annoyingly default to typescript.

Feed it your code and ask it questions.

Was i faster than usual? Sort of, but only because i could sit and author a class, get it reviewed, documented and have test scaffolded for it. The tests still need handholding 25% of the time however.

Qwen and Opus both have this nasty habit of scope creeping existing code. Or at worst using "optimised" loops or code structure (not considering flow, context and readability)

Will i use a llm in my editor? likely never, our tooling is already layered and nuanced, with errors being caught at multiple junctions, most of the time we agree on conventions and configurations.

My advice to young guns? Use AI to teach you to solve problems, learn architecture, patterns and dataflow. Use it to help you visualise and simplify. You are robbing yourself of the accomplishment of solving hard problems by palming it off.

I have junior devs (after a beer or two) moan about how boring code is, and how the web is dead compared to 10 years ago. Its because you have a cli for everything and any feature you could wish for is one yarn / bun / npm / deno command away.

The "fun" of coding is experimenting and failing successfully.
 
Coding anything past the basic boilerplate turns into spaghetti real fast.

The problem is maintaining context over any length of time.

It handles small tasks quite well. But a lot of handholding needs to happen from the onset as it conveniently forgets some finer details a few prompts in. I find myself restarting anew, tweaking my initial response multiple times to get it to understand what I want. But hey, for someone whose coding "expertise" peaked at if-this-then-that in school and whose proudest achievement is reaching stackoverflow copy-paste blackbelt status, it's still an absurdly powerful tool
 
It handles small tasks quite well. But a lot of handholding needs to happen from the onset as it conveniently forgets some finer details a few prompts in. I find myself restarting anew, tweaking my initial response multiple times to get it to understand what I want. But hey, for someone whose coding "expertise" peaked at if-this-then-that in school and whose proudest achievement is reaching stackoverflow copy-paste blackbelt status, it's still an absurdly powerful tool
And a tool that can go very far in helping you learn basic and advanced concepts of the code you're writing.

Many times the best question to ask a person or llm (with regards to code) is... explain this code or tell me what you think this does.

For devs, it allows them the freedom to reason, and for a llm it allows you the opportunity to evaluate feedback in a open environment.

Have an amazing week!
 
Where opus really shines is code review. It "understands" code really well.
ChatGPT as well. I have landing pages which need to be up for each Nvidia (and AMD, MSI, etc) promotion that runs and I grab the source from their page.

I had an issue with scaling not working when copy/pasting the +/- 15,000 lines, and after giving up on passing it snippets of the CSS and HTML files to ChatGPT I merged them into a txt document, uploaded it, and asked WTF. It's messy - there are classes and sub-classes and !importants overriding other styles - completely headache inducing.

15 seconds later I had the solution - faster than I can READ through the first line or three of the file.


image_2024_11_11T09_10_04_238Z.png
 
ChatGPT as well. I have landing pages which need to be up for each Nvidia (and AMD, MSI, etc) promotion that runs and I grab the source from their page.

I had an issue with scaling not working when copy/pasting the +/- 15,000 lines, and after giving up on passing it snippets of the CSS and HTML files to ChatGPT I merged them into a txt document, uploaded it, and asked WTF. It's messy - there are classes and sub-classes and !importants overriding other styles - completely headache inducing.

15 seconds later I had the solution - faster than I can READ through the first line or three of the file.


View attachment 1774454
Noice!
 
The [emoji239] USD paid version is more resourcefully
 
ChatGPT as well. I have landing pages which need to be up for each Nvidia (and AMD, MSI, etc) promotion that runs and I grab the source from their page.

I had an issue with scaling not working when copy/pasting the +/- 15,000 lines, and after giving up on passing it snippets of the CSS and HTML files to ChatGPT I merged them into a txt document, uploaded it, and asked WTF. It's messy - there are classes and sub-classes and !importants overriding other styles - completely headache inducing.

15 seconds later I had the solution - faster than I can READ through the first line or three of the file.


View attachment 1774454

I smashed together a python module that reads every class from a c# project and exports them all to a text file. Upload that whole thing to chatgpt and ask it to do a code review or whatever, huge time saver.

Have other code scraper modules for Angular and Python projects.
 
It handles small tasks quite well. But a lot of handholding needs to happen from the onset as it conveniently forgets some finer details a few prompts in. I find myself restarting anew, tweaking my initial response multiple times to get it to understand what I want. But hey, for someone whose coding "expertise" peaked at if-this-then-that in school and whose proudest achievement is reaching stackoverflow copy-paste blackbelt status, it's still an absurdly powerful tool
One of the best things I got ChatGPT to do was to take in pseudocode from a PDF from a hardware manufacturer and it generated the perfect typescript code from it.
 
Make some generative chess pieces and play:


Lol, one of these is not like the others:
1732875929034.png
 
Just came across This

Apparently Chatgpt can't say the name "David Mayer"
 
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