I’ll give you a concrete example from a few days ago in my job.
I needed a quick utility window in the Unity editor to see what animations could fire animation events and what those were.
I’m somewhat familiar with the editor API, enough to know what to Google and roughly where to go in the docs. I don’t do it enough though to really learn it beyond that point. So I’d estimate I could spend maybe one and a half hours, counting research, coding something, testing it and then context-switching back to what I was working on.
On a whim I asked ChatGPT (GPT-4) if it could do it for me. Formulating the prompt took a few minutes. I included a short bullet list of what I wanted and told it what Unity version I was on.
In almost an instant, it did it. I copied the code into a new file, added it to my project and it worked.
Time from idea to the first working version was around 10 minutes.
I asked for some minor refinement and then asked how I could extend it. It gave me starting points and taught me something new about Unity. All that slow doc searching, Google searching and forum-trawling was gone.
One worry I have for the long term is: how will we learn or adopt new programming languages in the future, when LLM du-jour knows nothing about Language X? Will we be stuck with what we’ve got because LLMs make us too productive in them?
I'm very worried that machine learning will lead to stagnation in general, in programming and in art. People will accept the machine output and call it a day instead of making something new.
But for a new language, there isn’t a large body of work to train the LLM on what idiomatic code looks like. It really worries me, that we’re going to be stuck at this local maximum
I needed a quick utility window in the Unity editor to see what animations could fire animation events and what those were.
I’m somewhat familiar with the editor API, enough to know what to Google and roughly where to go in the docs. I don’t do it enough though to really learn it beyond that point. So I’d estimate I could spend maybe one and a half hours, counting research, coding something, testing it and then context-switching back to what I was working on.
On a whim I asked ChatGPT (GPT-4) if it could do it for me. Formulating the prompt took a few minutes. I included a short bullet list of what I wanted and told it what Unity version I was on.
In almost an instant, it did it. I copied the code into a new file, added it to my project and it worked.
Time from idea to the first working version was around 10 minutes.
I asked for some minor refinement and then asked how I could extend it. It gave me starting points and taught me something new about Unity. All that slow doc searching, Google searching and forum-trawling was gone.
It’s like having my own personal dev assistant.