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A Research Preview of Codex

(openai.com)
376 points meetpateltech | 1 comments | 16 May 25 15:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.326s | source
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prhn ◴[16 May 25 15:32 UTC] No.44006680[source]▶
Is anyone using any of these tools to write non boilerplate code?

I'm very interested.

In my experience ChatGPT and Gemini are absolutely terrible at these types of things. They are constantly wrong. I know I'm not saying anything new, but I'm waiting to personally experience an LLM that does something useful with any of the code I give it.

These tools aren't useless. They're great as search engines and pointing me in the right direction. They write dumb bash scripts that save me time here and there. That's it.

And it's hilarious to me how these people present these tools. It generates a bunch of code, and then you spend all your time auditing and fixing what is expected to be wrong.

That's not the type of code I'm putting in my company's code base, and I could probably write the damn code more correctly in less time than it takes to review for expected errors.

What am I missing?

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1. Cu3PO42 ◴[16 May 25 15:49 UTC] No.44006868[source]▶
Occasionally. I find that there is a certain category of task that I can hand over to an LLM and get a result that takes me significantly less time to clean up than it would have taken me to write from scratch.

A recent example from a C# project I was working in. The project used builder classes that were constructed according to specified rules, but all of these builders were written by hand. I wanted to automatically generate these builders, and not using AI, just good old meta-programming.

Now I knew enough to know that I needed a C# source generator, but I had absolutely no experience with writing them. Could I have figured this out in an hour or two? Probably. Did I write a prompt in less than five minutes and get a source generator that worked correctly in the first shot? Also yes. I then spent some time cleaning up that code and understanding the API it uses to hook into everything and was done in half an hour and still learnt something from it.

You can make the argument that this source generator is in itself "boilerplate", because it doesn't contain any special sauce, but I still saved significant time in this instance.