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I don't know, my experience is kinda the opposite, but I have been programming since childhood. I find AI very frustrating to use, and rarely consult it.
Keep in mind that it has all of Github in its training data. It can go a long way by basically feeding you an existing project and not mentioning where it got it. I don’t mean to oversimplify and say that this is all models do and that there’s no reasoning, but I think people underestimate just how much is memorised: you can get mainstream models to recite entire books like Harry Potter almost word-for-word, with upwards of 95% accuracy, and to the extent that you can't, it's usually due to active sabotage by the model vendor to prevent people from getting free Harry Potter, not because the model doesn't have Harry Potter memorised. Vendors really do not want it to look like everything is getting memorised, but to a large extent it is. I just tried it with some random books I'm reading now and… yeah, they definitely have every book I'm trying memorised, even though they're very coy about it. And some of these are quite obscure books that I'm confident less than 1% of people would even recognise the name of. I then tried it on a snippet from a random library I published ten years ago on Github and… yeah, it has it memorised, down to the exact word. Amusingly, unlike the books, it does not go out of its way to tell me where this quote is from and lecture me about the importance of copyright. When I explicitly ask it where it got that, it just says it made it up—that it’s not a quote from any published book.
EDIT: to drive the point home, it is not so good at predicting the text of an unpublished library I have sitting on my PC! I suppose it's some consolation that this vendor does not appear to have access to my computer.
I have the same experience. It's just so glaringly obvious when it has to code something that is rare in its training data.
Load this folder of data (convoluted structure, some data is binary): perfect oneshot
Build a database from it: perfect oneshot
Do some signal processing on the data for cleanup: good ideas, uses the correct libraries and algorithms unprompted, but not immediately usable
Make plots for me to debug the signal processing: perfect oneshot, signal processing is now usable with minimal handholding
Data analysis, involving multiple integrals over the data along different axis: completely wrong, not even close. A first year grad student could solve this in a few hours, this is in at least a dozen of standard sub-field specific text books and has a very specific name - but it's probably not on github.
Discussion about a factor of 2 included in some text books, but not in others: completely wrong. having this discussion with an actual parrot would be equally as productive as the stochastic parrot.
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