Programming

17524 readers

471 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

snowe

Ategon

[email protected]

ChatGPT - is using it cheating? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/programming

45 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Over the last year I've been learning Swift and starting to put together some iOS apps. I'd definitely class myself as a Swift beginner.

I'm currently building an app and today I used ChatGPT to help with a function I needed to write. I found myself wondering if somehow I was "cheating". In the past I would have used YouTube videos, online tutorials and Stack Overflow, and adapted what I found to work for my particular usage case.

Is using ChatGPT different? The fact that ChatGPT explains the code it writes and often the code still needs fettling to get it to work makes me think that it is a useful learning tool and that as long as I take the time to read the explanations given and ensure I understand what the code is doing then it's probably a good thing on balance.

I was just wondering what other people's thoughts are?

Also, as a side note, I found that chucking code I had written in to ChatGPT and asking it to comment every line was pretty successful and a. big time saver :D

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] mrkite 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Agreed. While I've never used ChatGPT on an actual project, I've tested it on theoretical problems and I've never seen it give an answer that didn't have a problem.

So I would treat it like any answer on Stack Overflow, use it as a start, but you should definitely customize it and fix any edge cases.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I've never used ChatGPT (the workflow sounds tedious) but I have used GitHub copilot for personal stuff. The free ChatGPT has weird rights to your queries, whereas GH copilot doesn't snarf up your code. It genuinely saves a ton of time if you treat it like an in-line Stack Overflow query. It never gets it 100% right, but it can crap out boilerplate like nobody's business.

[–] JackbyDev 1 points 1 year ago

It also seems to depend a lot on how popular what you're asking about is. I asked it some questions about docker and it helped me understand some nuances between different commands in Dockerfiles that I was having trouble with. Docker is pretty widely used. I then asked it some questions about how to use the jpackage command from Gradle and it couldn't help at all.