• TriflingToad@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    chatgpt has been really good for teaching me code. As long as I write the code myself and just ask for clarity or best practices i haven’t had any bad hallucinations.

    For example I wanted to change a character in an array with another one but it would give some error about data types that were way out of my league. Anyways apparently I needed to run list(string) first even though string[5] will return the character.

    However that’s in python which I assume is well understood due to the ton of stackoverflow questions and alternative docs. I did ask it to do something in Google docs scripting something once and it had no idea what was going on and just hoped it worked. Fair enough, I also had no idea what was going on.

    • pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.org
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      2 days ago

      The reason why string[5] = '5' doesn’t work is that strings in Python are immutable (cannot be changed). By doing list(string) you are actually creating a new list with the contents of the string and then modifying the list.

      I wonder if ChatGPT explains this or just tells you to do this… as this works but can be quite inefficient.

      To me this highlights the danger with using AI… sure you can complete a task, but you may not understand why or learn important concepts.

      • jacksilver@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        Yeah, it’s a gift and a curse for exploring a new domain. It can help you move faster, but you’ll definitely loose some understanding you’d get from struggling on those topics longer.