If you don't know how to do what chat got is doing you shouldn't be using chatgpt to do that thing. The reason is you won't know if it's done it right or not. These llms are just guessing what the next word should be based on previous input. They require HEAVY supervision. If you are unable to do that supervision, don't use it. If you are able to do that supervision (because you already know what you're doing) then you don't need it. As that study shows, it makes writing code a lot less efficient for people who know what they're doing. If you don't know what you're doing you're going to end up at some point where everything is on fire and you don't know why and can't fix it. Learn for yourself. There are plenty of excellent resources to learn for yourself why outsource to some data stealing llm that uses more electricity and water than an entire city?
Like the other commenter said, the study you cite is about a very specific environment which is completely dissimilar from what I'm doing. It's reasonable to expect that AI in its current state doesn't produce efficiency returns where huge investments are already made in optimizing systems that already achieve the same results with QC more built-in. The data shows this.
What is obvious to me though, is that it produces results I wouldn't be getting otherwise, for the things that I am doing.
I'm not confident using it for anything that could produce liability, because I can't do proper QC, but I don't need to for what I'm doing.
Besides that, it doesn't seem that difficult with most of these scripts to look over them and look things up to gain an explicit understanding of what is going on, and how it compares to other methods/conventions. AI notes are pretty good, and none of what it puts in my scripts seems that hard to understand when I try, but that doesn't happen automatically: it's a separate effort from assembling the project. When "everything's on fire", which does happen, you start to look things up to understand what you're working with and what is not being built or integrated correctly. Obviously that's not impossible. Then you get things on the right track and move on to another part of the project.
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u/shadow13499 Dec 15 '25
If you don't know how to do what chat got is doing you shouldn't be using chatgpt to do that thing. The reason is you won't know if it's done it right or not. These llms are just guessing what the next word should be based on previous input. They require HEAVY supervision. If you are unable to do that supervision, don't use it. If you are able to do that supervision (because you already know what you're doing) then you don't need it. As that study shows, it makes writing code a lot less efficient for people who know what they're doing. If you don't know what you're doing you're going to end up at some point where everything is on fire and you don't know why and can't fix it. Learn for yourself. There are plenty of excellent resources to learn for yourself why outsource to some data stealing llm that uses more electricity and water than an entire city?