> I find it surprising that many developers find using ai prompts easier than an actual programming language (not the first time I hear about it, but now it seems to be serious).
I, too, was skeptical until...
I've making the switch to VS Code (not by choice...my previous daily driver, Atom, has been EOLed since December). Accordingly, I needed to port an Atom extension I wrote a long time ago to VS Code. What I didn't want to do was spend hours or days getting up to speed on how to write VS Code extensions, especially since this is the only one I'm ever likely to write (it's the only one I ever wrote for Atom :-)).
I used GPT-4 and it worked like a charm -- almost like magic. It wrote almost all the boilerplate and bullshittery for me. Was it perfect? No, the regex it came up with for recognizing the code pattern to which the extension applies (Scheme atoms or pairs) was crap. That's okay -- I know how to write regexes (in fact, I pretty much just dropped in my state machine parser from the old extension). But not having to spend hours and hours groveling through Microsoft docs and Googling to learn stuff I'm not likely to ever need again? Man, that was great.
> Programming in a natural language and trusting the results I just can’t stand.
This would worry me, too. But in this case, I was already well-familiar with Javascript and Typescript, so it was no problem for me to read the resulting code and give it a sanity check, test it, etc. I just didn't have to write it.
I, too, was skeptical until...
I've making the switch to VS Code (not by choice...my previous daily driver, Atom, has been EOLed since December). Accordingly, I needed to port an Atom extension I wrote a long time ago to VS Code. What I didn't want to do was spend hours or days getting up to speed on how to write VS Code extensions, especially since this is the only one I'm ever likely to write (it's the only one I ever wrote for Atom :-)).
I used GPT-4 and it worked like a charm -- almost like magic. It wrote almost all the boilerplate and bullshittery for me. Was it perfect? No, the regex it came up with for recognizing the code pattern to which the extension applies (Scheme atoms or pairs) was crap. That's okay -- I know how to write regexes (in fact, I pretty much just dropped in my state machine parser from the old extension). But not having to spend hours and hours groveling through Microsoft docs and Googling to learn stuff I'm not likely to ever need again? Man, that was great.
> Programming in a natural language and trusting the results I just can’t stand.
This would worry me, too. But in this case, I was already well-familiar with Javascript and Typescript, so it was no problem for me to read the resulting code and give it a sanity check, test it, etc. I just didn't have to write it.