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this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2024
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I had to help my wife with an Excel VBA script. I know a few programming languages but I don't know vba. Hours of googling turned up no useable scripts that did what I needed. ChatGPT wrote a working VBA script in seconds.
Anyone who thinks it is a fancy auto complete hasn't used it.
It is a fancy auto complete, just an incredibly fancy auto complete. In the same way that a computer that can run VR games, simulate the evolution of solar systems let you access something close to the sum total of human knowledge over the internet is a very fancy pocket calculator.
I think it's better explained as a search engine that works at the word level of granularity. It lets you do a word level search of all written human knowledge which allows it to adapt to your specific prompt. It's the next step in searching knowledge based. First we had libraries, then document search, now it's word search. I think it'll be impactful on the same level as the creation of libraries and search engines.
I'd tried using it for python and it made up some fake library that does not exist to handle the complex task I was asking it do it. Utterly useless. The way it works is so complicated is simply has you fooled thinking it's more than a fancy auto complete, but it is literally exactly that. Just the "smartest" auto complete there is. Don't worry about it, at least you did not fall it love with it and then left your wife to be with ChatGPT, right?
it's a tool to be used like any other. If you are relying on it to produce working code with no effort on your part then yes it is likely useless. If you are using it to get you most of the way there its very useful. For example, I'm most comfortable writing python but have been doing a lot of c# recently, asking a code focused LLM questions like "how do you rename a column of a c# datatable" is so much quicker and more useful than trying to search through blogspam its not even funny.