> As far as I can tell, chatgpt performs the action of finding and simplifying the information needed to take the next step forward [...] But that's all it does at the moment.
ChatGPT's output is certainly limited by its input. If you ask questions that can be answered by finding and simplifying information, then that's the answer you'll get. However, if you treat ChatGPT like a functioning software engineer, describe the problem space, explain the requirements, and define the boundaries, then ChatGPT will do much more. From that point on, you can ask it to explain why it chose a certain data structure, or to adjust an implementation approach, among other things.
With 15 prompts in 2 hours, I was able to pair program a novel 200-line program in Go that used AST parsing, command execution, pattern matching, file parsing, and custom data structures for specific data processing. All to solve a problem one of my teams experienced in the industry. ChatGPT wrote 99% of the code; I tweaked 2 or 3 lines because it had problems correcting an error in a regex (most likely due to the fact that ChatGPT sees tokens not characters). The code compiled, ran, and produced the exact result I wanted.
Researching, prototyping, and writing this code by hand would have taken me a few days probably. That's why the project sat on my TODO list for months
ChatGPT's output is certainly limited by its input. If you ask questions that can be answered by finding and simplifying information, then that's the answer you'll get. However, if you treat ChatGPT like a functioning software engineer, describe the problem space, explain the requirements, and define the boundaries, then ChatGPT will do much more. From that point on, you can ask it to explain why it chose a certain data structure, or to adjust an implementation approach, among other things.
With 15 prompts in 2 hours, I was able to pair program a novel 200-line program in Go that used AST parsing, command execution, pattern matching, file parsing, and custom data structures for specific data processing. All to solve a problem one of my teams experienced in the industry. ChatGPT wrote 99% of the code; I tweaked 2 or 3 lines because it had problems correcting an error in a regex (most likely due to the fact that ChatGPT sees tokens not characters). The code compiled, ran, and produced the exact result I wanted.
Researching, prototyping, and writing this code by hand would have taken me a few days probably. That's why the project sat on my TODO list for months