Is GPT & Bard bad for your developer education?
Practicing being a software developer is a skill that should be honed and explored. Is using GPT to bypass learning a good idea?
Beware when the road to perfection lacks imperfection!
A journey frought with hazards, tripups and footguns will result in a rich and wide education. With software development and engineering, the learning is never really done. With so many using GitHub Copilot, and GPT to aid the daily trauma of writing code, it worries me that long term skills will be lower quality, in essence becoming a glorified Google search. At least when you go off to Medium, Stackoverflow, Reddit et al in search of answers, you’re hit with comments, upvotes and downvotes, echoing in to large extend the community experience. Even the wrong ones or less accurate, show the thinking from other people to solving the same problem. That is gold!
Using GPT for ‘how to I?’ style questions is like spear fishing without knowing if you can eat what you stab, or trying to get a sun tan in the rain.
The answers you get are likely to stop you searching any further and that bothers me. A lot. Knowing at least half the software developer community is new at any given time and the software industry having decades of history, we should promote searching deep and wide for answers and not settling for a half baked LLM baked answer.
// Dave
- Tags: llm
- Categories: blog