Why I think ChatGPT struggles with novel coding tasks
The internet is full of code, which ChatGPT can riff on incredibly well.
However, the internet doesn’t contain as many explicit, detailed and accurate records of the thought process of the programmers who wrote it. ChatGPT isn’t as able to “riff on” the human thought process directly.
When I engineer prompts to help ChatGPT imitate my coding thought process, it does better. But it’s difficult to get it to put it all together fluently. When I code, I’m breaking tasks down, summarizing, chunking, simulating the results, and inventing test cases to try and identify failure modes. That all happens very quickly and only semi-consciously, and it isn’t represented in my code.
I can prompt ChatGPT to do any of these things as it works, and they all seem to help. But it’s difficult to get it to put it all together effectively. Its fluency at writing boilerplate, however, is genuinely a big productivity boost—and I’m more comfortable with a boring-boilerplate-writing AI than an AI that’s excellent at conceiving and executing novel tasks and plans.
Why I think ChatGPT struggles with novel coding tasks
The internet is full of code, which ChatGPT can riff on incredibly well.
However, the internet doesn’t contain as many explicit, detailed and accurate records of the thought process of the programmers who wrote it. ChatGPT isn’t as able to “riff on” the human thought process directly.
When I engineer prompts to help ChatGPT imitate my coding thought process, it does better. But it’s difficult to get it to put it all together fluently. When I code, I’m breaking tasks down, summarizing, chunking, simulating the results, and inventing test cases to try and identify failure modes. That all happens very quickly and only semi-consciously, and it isn’t represented in my code.
I can prompt ChatGPT to do any of these things as it works, and they all seem to help. But it’s difficult to get it to put it all together effectively. Its fluency at writing boilerplate, however, is genuinely a big productivity boost—and I’m more comfortable with a boring-boilerplate-writing AI than an AI that’s excellent at conceiving and executing novel tasks and plans.