I feel like most of my googling of simple code is because I know what I’m trying to do, but I don’t remember the correct function name and or language structure for the language I’m currently using.
This is about 50% of what I use ChatGPT for. Something I’ve done many times before, but I just need a quick reminder about the exact syntax.
The other 50% is just creating DTOs that have properties that are suitable for parsing JSON or XML or can be used to dump data from SQL into. The boring shit.
The real developer has been inside you all along!
Inside me?
gets scalpel
Here goes…
It’s all imposter syndrome, all the way down
IDK man, all the way? I don’t think I’m good enough to have actual impostor syndrome like real developers.
Haha right? Not saying this is you but whenever people try to tell me I have impostor syndrome, I’m thinking like “incompetent people exist. I’m just one of them”.
Real answer, learn how to paste several code snippets from stack overflow into a ChatGPT window and ask it to do what you need. Sprinkle in some copilot to tweak as needed. Congrats, Mr Programmer.
I get the joke.
But if, like me, you actually feel this here’s how I got away from it: make sure you actually understand things.
Read the error message over and over again, look up the words, understand what it is saying.
If something isn’t working, start reading the code and making sure you understand what each line is doing.
It will feel incredibly slow and painful at first. Eventually you will strengthen those.muscles, however, and it’ll become second nature.
Then you can cut and paste with confidence! 🤣
Additionally, don’t copy and paste anything until you understand it. If you don’t understand what code golf is being spewed, don’t take the top answer. If you don’t understand any answer, you probably don’t understand the underlying systems well enough and need to re-evaluate what your asking for.
The only difference between a novice and a professional is that a professional checks what they are copying to understand it first before allowing it into their codebase.
Novices copy code to avoid having to understand it. Professionals copy code to avoid reinventing the wheel.
ChatGPT is making me better because I’ve learned not to fucking trust it and double check everything it spits out to ensure its actually doing what’s asked of it.
I use it to help me lay out pseudo code and check it against what I come up with. It has made the way I structure things (and comment on things) way better.
You wouldn’t happen to be Burke from CS, would you?
I am who my name says and I have a degree in CS if that’s what you are asking.
Didn’t want to put too many details in the question for privacy sake. Knew a guy with your name in college, was curious if you were the same. Have a great day!
👍
Exactly. I cut and paste all the time but I make sure I know what the code is doing first before I actually add the code.
PC load letter? What the fuck does that mean?
Having worked at a copy place for a few years, that one makes me laugh every time.
For those that don’t know, the error is Print Cartridge needs letter sized paper to be loaded. It is just out of paper.
You’d often get the error when there was paper in the printer though. Turns out the cause is the slightly different size between US letter page size and A4 page size. Technically the printer’s correct to complain (for the same reason it’d be correct to complain about an A4 sized print while full of A5), but virtually nobody gives a shit about that difference and so the “PC Load Letter” message just translated to “You have to push that stupid button before I’ll do anything because pedantry.”
Wouldn’t that be the Paper Cartridge?
I believe it is Paper Cassette! And yes, I feel very old.
Yes, you are correct, elder one.
Wrong. It needs to be taken to a field and beaten into tiny pieces
The printer is obviously telling you to stuff some letters into your computer.
Like, duh. How else is email sent? Magic?
A series of pneumatic tubes, actually!
The internet…you see… it’s… it’s not just a big truck.
There are still some errors where you just need to know the fix. In that case it’s a baseball bat.
Damn it feels good to be a gangsta
Or just filling the paper tray (that’s what the error means)
Filling the paper tray with US Letter sized paper. If you aren’t in the US, you don’t use it and might not even be able to buy any.
Got me! I laughed tears!
Boomers: He just needs to learn to code!
Why is this a boomer thing?
Because, as I can attest as someone in their forties…
Boomers spent my youth telling me that I just needed a college degree, any college degree, and I would have a great job lined up for me almost anywhere.
Later, after many of us had graduated into a world that was absolutely fucking us we were told “Your degree was useless, why did you invest in something stupid that nobody uses like Early Childhood Education?” (something literally every child needs, adults with competent knowledge of early childhood education…)
Further, they would go on to say “Look at the tech industry, there’s good jobs there. Only STEM degrees matter, who gives a fuck about art or the human condition or literature. Who needs fucking “media literacy” and who needs to learn from the past to make sure we don’t make the same mistakes! LEARN TO CODE!”
“Learn to code” has been shoved down people’s throats by Boomers in positions of power for two decades now. After massive layoffs in the tech industries, it has become an even bigger joke than it was, because what are all those coders without jobs supposed to do? Learn to code? Pretty sure they already did that step.
Hmmm. Okay… but if someone doesn’t understand the code they are haphazardly copying and pasting until it “works,” they should learn how it works or they are a liability.
Do you disagree?
I think the joke about impostor syndrome went over your head.
You didn’t make that joke. Answer the question.
OK Boomer.
And this is why you’re unemployed. 😘
Wait, that’s a thing??? I can earn programmer money just by using copy & paste??? Maybe it’s time I changed jobs…
I spent years getting great with powershell so I can now confidently copy code out of chatgpt. Chatgpt’s ability to spit out close to correct code faster than I can type it is amazing, but useless if you don’t understand what the hell it’s trying to do.
Pretty much this, it’s the one use case for copilot, I know what I want to type anyway and copilot is usually close enough that 2 edits is faster than typing the whole thing and better for rsi.
Basically the work flow has changed from:
Find a framework that I need to integrate for whatever reason. Go to GumboChumbo.io read the docs.
Write some code based off of what’s in the doc, test the thing, read error message, read docs, ad new thing, but wall for obscure reason, spend thirty minutes looking through similar issues via Google-fu and then find an obscure comment from 6 years ago, That some how fixes this current issue. Implement it, get it working and then customize it.
Now it just streamlines finding these solutions.
Yeah it’s definitely a lot quicker than searching through 15 articles and stack overflow posts sometimes. Except for with regex and the sed command, the bastard thing kept messing that up
But sometimes Copilot just uses too much words to present the answer, so I use ChatGPT which can be personalized.
(Maybe it is possible with Copilot, too, maybe I have to ask how to do it)
I find the opposite, chatgpt (free version at least) gives all the explanation and stuff then a code block, copilot (not Microsoft the GitHub one) just prints the boilerplate directly in the editor then you press tab to accept.
Just tell gpt to be brief in your prompt
Copying and pasting: $1
Knowing what to copy and where to paste it: $999
To become a real programmer, you must install Copilot and let it copy and paste for you.
I feel like im slowly losing my ability to program between copilot, phind, and chatgpt…
I get the joke, ok?
Sarcastic image
read the code and pretend you understand it (real understanding will slowly come with that)
As funny of a joke “all programmers copy and paste” is, after 9 years that impostor syndrome should be gone, and if you still can’t figure out a solution without copying and pasting, maybe it is time to go back to the basics and learn how to code.
The difference between a junior and senior developer is that a senior developer actually understands what he’s copy pasting
But who’s the guy that originally wrote the code that everyone else is copy pasting? I think Nathan Kellert desires THAT level of expertise.
Pretty much. I try to tell juniors that the things I’m teaching you is things I made a mistake on. I have a decade of failure and I’m trying to help you shortcut it.
But as soon as someone gets to an intermediate level and start thinking for themself and make those exact same mistakes.
“We’ve been doing things wrong this whole time! I figured out a better way!” Then spend a lot of time implementing the “better” way only to find out it performs like shit and actually takes more work to implement and maintain anything.
Everyone has to do that at least once.
I’m a senior developer and I rarely copy and paste… I’ll sometimes look at some other code to get ideas, but I retype it. It helps me understand the code, and I can refractor it or write it differently as I go.
I’ve only been programming seriously (for work) in the last two years and honestly don’t get the copy pasting memes. I get copy pasting a 1-3 line terminal snippet sometimes, but idk how people are getting away without actually writing their own code.
I only program non-seriously for work on occasions and I’ve rarely used copy/pasted code. Except maybe some of my own code because of using lazy logic trees to deal with variation in the data being processed. Doesn’t need to be pretty or efficient. Just needs to work well enough so I do a less manual work.
I program professionally, and I copy paste all the time. The difference is when I copy paste, its 10-20 lines of code, not a line or two— and I’m not fishing for a solution to the problem. I already have the optimal solution in my head, and I am just searching for the solution I already know. It’s just faster than typing it by hand 🤷🏻
I do this often. Not because I can’t do it myself or understand what I’m doing, but why would I write the exact same code when it has been done and pasted online a million times?
Get a pro GPT subscription and command it to copy paste for you of course
I may do that already when I get stuck… Tbf I am trying to learn and only ask it to explain how to do something or if I have a bug I can’t figure out. I feel sometimes it’s just best to get an answer if I’ve been stuck for a while because I’m not making progress anyway.
I swear to God it gets things wrong like 50% of the time though (both syntax and conceptually) for programming.
When I was messing around with it, I had to go back and fix it’s code more often than not. It’s still useful for get the be bones of a program going though.
It’s not too bad for learning a new language, but you still have to make an effort to understand why the code it’s giving you works… or doesn’t work which can happen often.
It’s so great at getting unstuck and learning news ways of doing thing that everyone knows but me. Even if most of its actual code is borked.
Yeah today after getting three bad answers in a row from ChatGPT I was quoting Thanos… “Fine. I’ll do it myself.”
You tell him “stop giving away our secrets!”
And yeah, a lot of people in the comments are running away from the joke, but realistically, to copy+paste code and have it work, you generally have to have a grasp of the code, at least to ask what you want and to paste it and change the variable names, and write the lines to stitch it all together.
Add imposter syndrome on top of that, and it may seem like you don’t do anything of use because you copied 3 functions out of a 1k line file.
Do people really constantly copy-paste code? If I don’t know something I’ll look it up, but then I’ll read the answer and apply it to the code I’m writing rather than copying it directly. I rarely see a piece of code that I can copy over directly into what I’m doing, and even if I can it’s usually not thr best idea because the naming etc would be inconsistent
Depends on the language. I’m not gonna find shit to copy-paste for what I’m doing in Scala 3 or F#, but in Rust or C++ I’ll frequently Google an issue I can’t figure out and someone will have some fancy black magic hacker solution with super-iterators and turbofishies and weird type inference that I couldn’t think of myself and just throw it in my code with some minor modifications :)
