I’ve been coding for like… 25 years, mostly professionally.
I’ve been learning game development on and off for years and just started with Godot and c#. I use deepseek and chatgpt sometimes because I know what I want to do just not the best syntax to do it (and throw in having to avoid dynamic stuff for iOS’ AoT compiler)
Both frequently forget the language, library, task or context. Context is ok, but asking for how to do X in Y and it gives you an answer predicated on using Z (which l, due to unfamiliarity you don’t find out until after starting to implement it) sucks.
I get a slightly easier day when it works. But I’ve lost days of time to it fucking with me. Eventually you become so wary that it really is just a glorified search engine now. I tell it show me X and only the code, that seems to be the fastest way to get what I need and confirm it’s not hallucinating a different environment or whatever.
People with less experience in general will suffer far worse because those pitfalls won’t be obvious to them.
GPT got worse with the most recent update, answers ignore large chunks of the prompt and as they distill further I think that will get worse.
Tl;Dr AI isn’t very good at programming and seems to have gotten worse (at least with specific questions Vs general ones)
I now refer to an Amazon review on a scripting language:
spoiler
Don’t purchase the first edition of this book if you are new to coding.
The technical editor missed a number of errors or mistakes in the example code. I have experience coding multiple scripting languages, so I recognize mistakes in the book and can remedy them in my own code and continue the lesson. Beginners, however, will type the example code and the output won’t match the book and they won’t have the experience to know why.
I found and identified something like five errors in the first three chapters. In chapter four, there is an error that will cause the reader to get no output while the book shows five lines of text as the output. Again, a seasoned coder from another language will be able to identify the cause and then look for the right command to plug in, but a first-time or very green learner will just be frustrated.
All that said, this is an excellent book for someone who understands the concepts of scripting languages and just wants exposure to the PowerShell way of doing things. The author writes clearly and competently. Would recommend whole-heartedly to any who are comfortable in other languages.
People write books. People are imperfect. People write imperfect books. It’s not hard to copy / pasta the wrong notes when assembling the bones of a book.
I’ve been coding for like… 25 years, mostly professionally.
I’ve been learning game development on and off for years and just started with Godot and c#. I use deepseek and chatgpt sometimes because I know what I want to do just not the best syntax to do it (and throw in having to avoid dynamic stuff for iOS’ AoT compiler)
Both frequently forget the language, library, task or context. Context is ok, but asking for how to do X in Y and it gives you an answer predicated on using Z (which l, due to unfamiliarity you don’t find out until after starting to implement it) sucks.
I get a slightly easier day when it works. But I’ve lost days of time to it fucking with me. Eventually you become so wary that it really is just a glorified search engine now. I tell it show me X and only the code, that seems to be the fastest way to get what I need and confirm it’s not hallucinating a different environment or whatever.
People with less experience in general will suffer far worse because those pitfalls won’t be obvious to them.
GPT got worse with the most recent update, answers ignore large chunks of the prompt and as they distill further I think that will get worse.
Tl;Dr AI isn’t very good at programming and seems to have gotten worse (at least with specific questions Vs general ones)
I now refer to an Amazon review on a scripting language:
spoiler
Don’t purchase the first edition of this book if you are new to coding.
The technical editor missed a number of errors or mistakes in the example code. I have experience coding multiple scripting languages, so I recognize mistakes in the book and can remedy them in my own code and continue the lesson. Beginners, however, will type the example code and the output won’t match the book and they won’t have the experience to know why.
I found and identified something like five errors in the first three chapters. In chapter four, there is an error that will cause the reader to get no output while the book shows five lines of text as the output. Again, a seasoned coder from another language will be able to identify the cause and then look for the right command to plug in, but a first-time or very green learner will just be frustrated.
All that said, this is an excellent book for someone who understands the concepts of scripting languages and just wants exposure to the PowerShell way of doing things. The author writes clearly and competently. Would recommend whole-heartedly to any who are comfortable in other languages.
How would a programming book have that kind of mistakes? Do they manually type the code, and output separately?
Any semi-competent programmer will copy paste the code to the terminal and copy the output.
And any competent programmer will make sure the output is auto generated from the code so there’s no mistakes.
People write books. People are imperfect. People write imperfect books. It’s not hard to copy / pasta the wrong notes when assembling the bones of a book.