I trialed GitHub Copilot and used ChatGPT for a bit, but recently I found myself using them less and less.

I’ve found them valuable when doing something new(at least to me), but for most of my day-to-day it seems to have lost it’s luster.

  • 𝕊𝕚𝕤𝕪𝕡𝕙𝕖𝕒𝕟@programming.devEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Unfortunately the tutorials out there are mostly terrible. I’ve learnt it by experimenting a lot and seeing what worked for me. Some general advice:

    • Subscribe to both Copilot and ChatGPT Plus and try using them as much as possible for at least a month. Some people prefer the former, others the latter, and you can’t know in advance which.
    • Always use the GPT-4 model in ChatGPT but keep in mind that there is a 25 answers/3 hours rate limit. So try to squeeze as many questions and information into your messages as possible. GPT-4 is miles ahead of any other publicly available LLM, including GPT-3.5.
    • Tips for ChatGPT:
      • Give detailed, well-written prompts. Try to describe the problem the same way you would to a coworker.
      • After describing the problem, ask ChatGPT if it needs any additional information to implement the code well. It usually asks very insightful questions.
      • Answer the questions and then ask it to break down the problem into individual functions and then, in separate messages, ask it to implement them one by one.
      • Remember that the context window is limited, after some time it won’t remember the beginning of the conversation so it’s worth repeating parts of the specification later.
    • Tips for Copilot:
      • Write the method signature and have Copilot implement it for you
      • Write a comment and have Copilot implement the corresponding code
      • Paste the code as a comment in a different language, write “the same logic in $lang2” in a comment, and it will translate it from $lang1 into $lang2.