I call it my "low IQ assistant". If I have some menial task that I don't feel like coding, I ask the AI to do it for me and it's usually pretty good - except that you do need to check everything! You could ask a junior to do the same thing.

I have tested a number of AIs with a bunch of tech questions and the one that got by far the highest score was Bing Chat - that said I didn't have access to GPT-4 and Bing Chat is essentially GPT-4 but for free. It's now called Copilot.

I also use it for assisting in comprehending business requirements. I take a doco and ask it to group common themes and produce summaries of the requirements. Like most developers, my attention would be struggling otherwise. I can also ask it to act like a BDD expert and produce Gherkin statements for the testers.

It helps a lot when I get stuck on a problem. I often get a much better answer if I ask Bing Chat than if I try to Google it. That could, of course, be a consequence of how bad Google has become at providing an answer. Sometimes other people in the team have issues and they come to me with a much more sophisticated problem. This might mean that I don't even know the context of the issue they are having, but I can interrogate Bing Chat and it will give me a response that is quite helpful in many cases.

It helps when I want to get started on a new problem. I can ask it what I think I need to know and it often returns answers that help me fine tune what I am trying to do. Sometimes that requires multiple interactions. If I'm looking for a new library to solve a problem, I can ask it for advice on what to look at. It is often helpful, but sometimes makes wrong assumptions about what I am trying to achieve. The important thing is it gives me an idea of some libraries to consider.

Finally, there comes a point at which its value drops and I am getting better at detecting when that happens and...head to stack overflow.


On Fri, Feb 23, 2024 at 12:25 PM Dr Greg Low via ozdotnet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> wrote:

There were other things I should have mentioned.

 

The new PowerPoint co-pilot where you just say “Prepare me a presentation about what’s in xyz.docx” is pretty amazing.

 

I’ve used ChatGPT to rewrite marketing blurb for various things. It does that very well. However, I’ve asked it to improve a paragraph of writing, and find that something like the Hemmingway editor does a far superior job.

 

In Teams, having the AI tool write a summary of what just happened in a meeting is pretty stunning.

 

We are going to just be using these tools all day long.

 

Regards,

 

Greg

 

Dr Greg Low

 

1300SQLSQL (1300 775 775) office | +61 419201410 mobile

SQL Down Under | Web: https://sqldownunder.com | About Greg:  https://about.me/greg.low

 

From: Dr Greg Low
Sent: Friday, February 23, 2024 12:11 PM
To: ozDotNet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com>
Cc: Tom Gao <tom@tomgao.com>
Subject: RE: AI

 

Hi Tom,

 

For me, it depends what you want it to do. It certainly can appear to help someone who’s new to an area.

 

For most code writing, I’ve been pretty underwhelmed. As an example, if I ask it to write SQL, I get a very poor outcome. It will use old deprecated views instead of the current system views (that have been around for a decade), and often does things in a convoluted way.

 

What I have been impressed with, is how it can help you understand acronyms, etc. Quite amazing. I’ve also been pretty impressed with using it go generate some test data, including in multiple languages. And the test data is fairly believable. If I ask it for family names, and I also ask for Chinese, it does pick common Chinese family names in the test output. That’s pretty impressive.

 

It can do a reasonable job of things like “here’s some DAX code, can you simplify it?” It often can. Or “here’s a regular expression, can you explain what it does?” and it does that just fine. I’ve seen people happily using it to explain code that they don’t understand, or to (sort of) document some code.

 

But it also is so confident on things, yet so wrong. I gave it a 25 question baseball umpire test the other day. It was 100% confident sounding, but 40% correct. The weird thing is that some of the questions that it got right, are things that new human umpires often get wrong. Yet for simpler questions, it would say that something legal is illegal.

 

It’s certainly interesting, but it’s very much a work in progress. It will be part of our futures.

 

Regards,

 

Greg

 

Dr Greg Low

 

1300SQLSQL (1300 775 775) office | +61 419201410 mobile

SQL Down Under | Web: https://sqldownunder.com | About Greg:  https://about.me/greg.low

 

From: Tom Gao via ozdotnet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com>
Sent: Friday, February 23, 2024 11:58 AM
To: ozDotNet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com>
Cc: Tom Gao <tom@tomgao.com>
Subject: AI

 

Hi guys, I haven't posted in a few years and haven't been on the tools for a long time now as well. I'm on a panel on a digital conference coming up in march. We had a pre meeting today and the topic of AI came up. Two of the panelist said cited CBA and Westpac using AI and were able to save 30% on development effort. 

 

Personally I just finished an AI course my view is quite the opposite. My personal opinion of the generative AI space and AI in general having spent time with the academics is that the benefits are significantly over inflated. 

 

I want to get some other opinions if you are seeing any significant benefit and that I may be just out of touch or not aware.

 

Thanks,

Tom

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