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OpenAI is reportedly going all-in as a for-profit company (mashable.com)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I honestly don't use it much, but so far, the most productive uses are:

generate some common structure/algorithm - web app, CLI program, recursive function, etc
search documentation - I may not know what the function/type is, but I can describe it
generate documentation - list arguments, return types, etc

But honestly, the time I save there honestly isn't worth fighting with the AI most of the time, so I'll only do it if I'm starting up a big greenfield project and need something up and going quickly. That said, there are some things I refuse to use AI for:

testing - AI may be able to get high coverage, but I don't think it can produce high quality tests
business logic - the devil is in the details, and I don't trust AI with details
producing documentation - developers hate writing documentation, which is precisely why devs should be the ones to do it; if AI could do it, other devs could just use AI to generate it, but good docs will do far more than what AI can intuit

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Super, thanks again for taking the time to do so.

I can't remember if I shared this earlier but I'm jolting down notes on the topic in https://fabien.benetou.fr/Content/SelfHostingArtificialIntelligence so I do also invest time on the topic. Yet my results have also been... subpar so I'm asking as precisely as I can how others actually benefit from it. I'm tired of seeing posts with grand claims that, unlike you, only talk about the happy path in usage. Still, I'm digging not due to skepticism as much as trying to see what can actually be leveraged, not to say salvaged. So yes, genuine feedback like yours is quite precious.,

I do seem to hear from you and others that to kickstart what would be a blank project and get going it can help. Also that for whatever is very recurrent AND popular, like common structures, it can help.

My situation though is in prototyping where documentation is sparse, if even existent, and working examples are very rare. So far it's been a bust quite often.

Out of curiosity, which AI tools specifically do you use and do you pay for them?

PS: you mention documentation is both cases, so I imagine it's useful when it's very structured and when the user can intuit most of how something works, closer to a clearly named API with arguments than explaining the architecture of the project.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Out of curiosity, which AI tools specifically do you use and do you pay for them?

Just whatever is free, so no, I don't pay for them for two reasons:

my boss doesn't allow AI to have access to our codebase
I honestly don't find enough value to actually pay

So I'll just find something with a free tier or trial and generate a little bit of code or something. Or I'll use the AI feature in a search engine to help me get search terms for relevant documentation (i.e. list libraries that do X), and then I'll actually read the documentation. I have coworkers who use it for personal projects (not sure what they use), and that's also part of what I've listed above (i.e. the generating documentation part).

But I very rarely use AI, because I very rarely start projects from scratch. 99% of my work is updates to existing projects, so it's really not that useful.