I've tried Copilot, Bing, Chat-GPT4, etc. I spend ages "prompt engineering" to get scraps of barely acceptable code. Then when I paste the bits together it still doesn't get the job done properly.

IMHO AI is scavenging code from all over the internet. It might be excellent at doing leet code, but when you get to the level of application domain knowledge and environment specifics it is easier to just DIY.

The recent tweaking of Google Gemini must surely be more "programming" not directed learning.

I find some (little) value in getting throwaway code done.

What is useful is asking chatgpt instead of googling and then checking the results - which feels like faster googling, i.e. it's a familiar process, just streamlined.

What I find useful and new is the ability to do a quick occasional consult on a tool or on what code does,

e.g.:

I thought a makefile should be reading something from an environment variable - it wasn't - so I had this quick chat:

ChatGPT 3.5

User: Hi again

:wave:

as usual I like terse replies

lets understand makefiles

ChatGPT:

:wave: Sure, makefiles are used for building and managing projects...

>8-------redacted non-terse makefile summary

User:

What does this mean/do?

```Makefile $(eval TERRAFORM_VERSION:=1.4.5) ```

ChatGPT:

In this Makefile snippet, the $(eval ...) function is used to evaluate the expression and set the variable TERRAFORM_VERSION to the value 1.4.5. The eval function in a Makefile is a way to perform variable assignments dynamically during the execution of the Makefile.

So, after this line is executed, TERRAFORM_VERSION will be defined with the value 1.4.5. This can be useful for specifying and managing the version numbers or other variables in a Makefile, allowing for more flexibility and easy updates.

User:

so 1.4.5 is constant - it doesn't look at the environment variable?

ChatGPT:

Yes, that's correct. In the given Makefile snippet, the TERRAFORM_VERSION is explicitly set to the constant value 1.4.5. It doesn't dynamically look at the environment variable or any other external source; rather, it directly assigns the specified value to the variable during the evaluation of the Makefile. If you want to make it dynamic and read from an environment variable, you would use a different approach.

Hmm I can’t remember how to read a file into xml in powershell… ask gpt and save yourself 15 minutes

My exact opinion almost 40 years ago.

I don't know how many people there are like me, but it could be good to have something to demotivate me from coding anything that could be handled by mindlessly training on other peoples' data.