OpenAI launched ChatGPT Agent on Thursday, its latest effort in the industry-wide pursuit to turn AI into a profitable enterprise—not just one that eats investors’ billions. In its announcement blog, OpenAI says its Agent “can now do work for you using its own computer,” but CEO Sam Altman warns that the rollout presents unpredictable risks.
[…]
OpenAI research lead Lisa Fulford told Wired that she used Agent to order “a lot of cupcakes,” which took the tool about an hour, because she was very specific about the cupcakes.
It won’t do that well. What you have to do is ask it to help you leverage your existing development skills in an unfamiliar domain. I used it to help me write a python program to authenticate, pull and filter data from a GCP firestore database and create an XLSX with summary and detail sheets.
I’ve never used Python before in my life. It took me about 4 hours. Of course I’ve been doing that sort of thing in Java for many years. Turned out I wrote that faster in Python than I could in Java. Configuring the connection to that database in Python was so simple compared to Java.
The stuff it wrote was sometimes incomplete or wrong in subtle ways, but I could see the bits that didn’t make sense which helped me focus on those things and ask better questions to help me figure it out. I think the last hour was just me tweaking stuff by myself because I didn’t need help with it by that point.
Anyone who already knows another programming language but has never used python in their life can write a simple python app quickly, regardless
No you can’t if you don’t know the libraries. Python is entirely dependent on what libraries you include. If you don’t know what you need you can’t do shit.
IDE.
??
IDE.
The problems you propose in your comment are not only greatly exaggerated but already been solved for decades using conventional tools AND apply to literally all languages, having nothing at all to do with python. Good try! My statement holds true.
Maybe your assumption is that you’re in a cave writing code in pencil on paper, but that’s not a typical working condition. If you have access to Claude to use as a crutch, then you have access to search for an available python library and read some “Getting Started” paragraphs.
Seriously, if the only real value that AI provides is “you don’t need to know the libraries you’re using” 💀 that’s not quite as strong of an argument as you think it is lmaooo “knowing the libraries” isn’t exactly an existing challenge or software engineering problem that people struggle with…
In a cave with pen and paper is nearly what I learned with. I learned with the run time, msdn, notepad and the cmd line. And yes you do end up in many situations where you simply don’t have or can’t use a full on ide everytime. Sounds like you’ve never really left your comfort zones and stuck your neck out in some tech you don’t understand quite yet. Or worked in areas under strict software controls.
It’s telling that you’re focused on personal assumptions instead of addressing the argument
What was the argument. Use an IDE which was the proposed answer for most of my objections. Which i did address.
I needed about 30 minutes to do a python application from scratch that took linear JSON data files, merged them and presented them as a tree in a GUI.
Before that I had barely done anything in python, basically could do a basic function declaration with a simple operation and nothing else. I even didn’t have a lot of experience with UI at all.
But like you I had experience with java and such, and those skills transfer. All it took was searching basic syntax/related code examples and required library imports. And I mean basic, search engine search, not AI answers.
All I’m saying is, I really don’t think AI is providing anything a lot more efficient than doing a good old crawl through API docs and stack overflow. So the fact it’s using tremendous amounts of resources to maybe achieve a 10% efficiency boost is bothering me a lot.
If that was a 10% boost for you and you could’ve done it in 33 minutes without AI or experience, then my imposter syndrome has been right all along!
I’d bet that would’ve taken me a few days and maybe buying a reference book and starting with hello world.