Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

I've found this to be one of the most useful ways to use (at least) GPT-4 for programming. Instead of telling it how an API works, I make it guess, maybe starting with some example code to which a feature needs to be added. Sometimes it comes up with a better approach than I had thought of. Then I change the API so that its code works.

Conversely, I sometimes present it with some existing code and ask it what it does. If it gets it wrong, that's a good sign my API is confusing, and how.

These are ways to harness what neural networks are best at: not providing accurate information but making shit up that is highly plausible, "hallucination". Creativity, not logic.

(The best thing about this is that I don't have to spend my time carefully tracking down the bugs GPT-4 has cunningly concealed in its code, which often takes longer than just writing the code the usual way.)

There are multiple ways that an interface can be bad, and being unintuitive is the only one that this will fix. It could also be inherently inefficient or unreliable, for example, or lack composability. The AI won't help with those. But it can make sure your API is guessable and understandable, and that's very valuable.

Unfortunately, this only works with APIs that aren't already super popular.

> Sometimes it comes up with a better approach than I had thought of.

IMO this has always been the killer use case for AI—from Google Maps to Grammarly.

I discovered Grammarly at the very last phase of writing my book. I accepted maybe 1/3 of its suggestions, which is pretty damn good considering my book had already been edited by me dozens of times AND professionally copy-edited.

But if I'd have accepted all of Grammarly's changes, the book would have been much worse. Grammarly is great for sniffing out extra words and passive voice. But it doesn't get writing for humorous effect, context, deliberate repetition, etc.

The problem is executives want to completely remove humans from the loop, which almost universally leads to disastrous results.

What's wrong with passive?

In addition to the points already made, passive voice is painfully boring to read. And it's literally everywhere in technical documentation, unfortunately.

I don't think it's boring. It's easy to come up with examples of the passive voice that aren't boring at all. It's everywhere in the best writing up to the 19th century. You just don't notice it when it's used well unless you're looking for it.

Consider:

> Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

This would not be improved by rewriting it as something like:

> Now the Confederacy has engaged us in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation whose founders conceived and dedicated it thus, can long endure.

This is not just longer but also weaker, because what if someone else is so conceiving and so dedicating the nation? The people who are still alive, for example, or the soldiers who just fought and died? The passive voice cleanly covers all these possibilities, rather than just committing the writer to a particular choice of who it is whose conception and dedication matters.

Moreover, and unexpectedly, the passive voice "we are engaged" takes responsibility for the struggle, while the active-voice rephrasing "the Confederacy has engaged us" seeks to evade responsibility, blaming the Rebs. While this might be factually more correct, it is unbefitting of a commander-in-chief attempting to rally popular support for victory.

(Plausibly the active-voice version is easier to understand, though, especially if your English is not very good, so the audience does matter.)

Or, consider this quote from Ecclesiastes:

> For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten.

You could rewrite it to eliminate the passive voice, but it's much worse:

> For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that everyone shall forget all which now is in the days to come.

This forces you to present the ideas in the wrong order, instead of leaving "forgotten" for the resounding final as in the KJV version. And the explicit agent "everyone" adds nothing to the sentence; it was already obvious.

> Consider:

>> Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

> This would not be improved by rewriting it as something like:

>> Now the Confederacy has engaged us in a great civil war [...]

It's technically possible to parse "we are engaged" as a verb in the passive voice.

But it's an error to think that's how you should parse it. That clause is using the active verb be, not the passive verb engage; it's fully parallel to "Now we are happy".