20

Over the last year I've been learning Swift and starting to put together some iOS apps. I'd definitely class myself as a Swift beginner.

I'm currently building an app and today I used ChatGPT to help with a function I needed to write. I found myself wondering if somehow I was "cheating". In the past I would have used YouTube videos, online tutorials and Stack Overflow, and adapted what I found to work for my particular usage case.

Is using ChatGPT different? The fact that ChatGPT explains the code it writes and often the code still needs fettling to get it to work makes me think that it is a useful learning tool and that as long as I take the time to read the explanations given and ensure I understand what the code is doing then it's probably a good thing on balance.

I was just wondering what other people's thoughts are?

Also, as a side note, I found that chucking code I had written in to ChatGPT and asking it to comment every line was pretty successful and a. big time saver :D

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] canpolat@programming.dev 4 points 1 year ago

No, it's not cheating (unless you are using it to do your homework, I guess). It's a tool and like any other we learn how to use it appropriately.

But one needs to be aware of other ethical concerns related to using AI generated code. The discussion revolves around companies (OpenAI, Github, etc.) training their models using the code written by people who have not consented use of their code as training data. In some cases, licensing is clear and allows for such use, but in some cases it's debatable (I'm not that much involved in those discussions, so I cannot provide more details).

When creating software, the value we bring is the understanding of a problem and the ability to ask the correct questions that will bring us to a good solution. In simple scenarios, even a machine can do what we do and we should definitely use the machine instead of spending time on that.

this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
20 points (83.3% liked)

Programming

17314 readers
172 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev



founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS