Jason GormanWe spend roughly 10x as much time reading code as we do writing it. A tool or technique that makes you twice as "productive" at writing code *at best* makes you 5% more productive over all. Making your code easier to understand will have 10x the impact. But that doesn't sell tools or put developers out of work, so you won't be reading about it in Forbes.
Chris Pitts@jasongorman Obviously ChatGPT is a master of stating the bleedin’ obvious.
@thirstybear That's the thing: if it doesn't have the information, it can't generate an explanation. It excels at explaining code that's easy to understand. The real selling point is brownie points for comments. Like at university.
@jasongorman Yes, but I have worked with (senior) developers who commented their code just like that 😁
@thirstybear Readability Theatre
Andreas K@jasongorman @thirstybear Well, I have worked with "developers" that needed the comments because they somehow were such great developers that they have issues reading simple statements.
But yes, perhaps we should not try to orientate us by the worst cases of commercial software engineering that we've seen. That can cause depression.
@jasongorman @thirstybear
This thought example about the Thai national library (as training data, without books with non-Thai text or images) illustrates it perfectly:
Basically no chance that you'll learn Thai, the language, the meaning from the dead books, even the massive corpus will not help.
You might learn how a reasonable Thai text look.
So if somebody submits some Thai text to you (say a question, but you wouldn't know, obviously, you know how Thai looks, but you have no idea what it means), you might be able to continue it.
But not understand if you just answered, “sure, one big fries coming up with your burger, sir” or “sure I did murder that family, I confess”.
So the idea that a LLM is capable of explaining your code to you, anthropomorphizing at its worst.
No it's not your coding buddy.