Quote of the Day
For it to replace you, you have to communicate requirements which are not possible in native English. That’s why we invented programming languages,
Syed Ghazanfer
May 29, 2023
Lawyer uses ChatGPT in court and now ‘greatly regrets’ it
This is what I was coming up with when I tried to use Bing Chat to write code. It would write code which, if you squinted and looked at it sideways, you might believe it had written the code I asked for. But it wasn’t really what I wanted. As I repeatedly reworded the requests I found I could not be specific enough to get it to understand what I wanted. I concluded it was easier to just write the code myself except in some very specific cases.
The lawyer regrets using AI to do his job.
I regret the website used an Australian stand-up comedian to write the article. Grammar, syntax, ‘n tenses ‘n stuff are things to know about, ya so-called journalists.
Even writing the code yourself you run into edge cases like one I hit today:
“Yes, HAL, technically a 1 is contained in the delimited string that includes a ten. I only intended this block to execute if a ten was among the possible inputs, but not a one.”
And even my first attempt to fix this edge case failed because I didn’t enforce an order of operations on the concatenation to the comparison operation string.
99% of programming isn’t knowing how to tell the commuter what you want it to do–it’s figuring out *why* the computer *isn’t* doing what you want it to do.
In an interview, I have never been asked to find errors. The coding questions are always to write new code.
This, IMHO, is wrong. When I interview developers, all the coding related questions are for them to find the bugs in a few five to 10 line code samples.