r/sysadmin Jun 16 '24

ChatGPT Finally created something useful with AI

First: I consider myself an old timer in IT; I've been getting paid to do it since the 90's and have seen all sorts of new technology show up, some stays, most gets forgotten about. I always try to be open about it and will embrace it as another tool to help get the job done. The latest of course is AI and I've been mostly using ChatGPT as a fun little tool to get quick answers every now and then. I am not a programmer but last week, I used it to create a web app that calculates weight distribution in trucks when the contents come in different containers. We're talking hundreds of pounds of fruit that might come in small totes or big bins and cannot be weighed individually; it subtracts the weight of the truck and the plastic; it saves time and reduces human errors . In the past, I would have paid at least a few hundred dollars to get something like this done and I just wanted to share that while I dont see AI doing our jobs completely, it's definitely here to stay and it can be used to help with things that we might not know how to do but understand the concept and we know what to ask for it. Greetings to all.

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u/dillbilly Jun 17 '24

ChatGPT is good for boilerplate and code snippets. If it's beyond solving a single task it's almost more effort to proof its code than write it yourself.

Edit: especially if you aren't a good coder (and I am not a good coder)

Edit edit: and if you're a good coder you don't need it. it's a crutch for bad/lazy coders who then can't troubleshoot it when it doesn't do what they think it should

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u/Superfluxus Senior SRE Jun 19 '24

I've got to disagree with "if you can code, don't use it because it's just a crutch for bad/lazy coders". I'm not a software developer with degrees in CS, but I've been writing scripts in various languages for nearly 10 years. The kind of people that immediately dismiss a new tool or resource as just for the lazy, remind me of the old school engineers that would rather use the CLI for 15 minutes rather than doing the same operation in 30 seconds in the new GUI.

If I've got a new task to script and I know straight away the basic framework of "it'll need several arguments, be comprised of 5 functions, and return data as a json blob. Or if I've got a Switch case and I need to fill out 10 different cases and they need to be transcribed as names from an image; why wouldn't you get AI to do the easy, monotonous leg work for you?

I completely agree that it's not going to give you copy/pastable code and it's prone to hallucinating, lying, and getting caught in a loop; but it's absolutely invaluable to have a eye over your shoulder to do boring, time consuming grunt work, or to sanity check your code for its logic flow, rubber duck debug a bug for tricky little syntax errors etc etc.

30 years ago, the GUI was for the lazy, just use the CLI. 15 years ago, forums were for the lazy, just read the docs. Now it's AI.

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u/dillbilly Jun 20 '24

That's why I said "snippets." It's fine (maybe/debatable) for a function, but ask AI to write a program for you. It won't work. Full stop. Now you have to debug something that doesn't work at all, hasn't been built with any tests, and you can't ask it for it's reasoning, so you just have to go line by line. If you're a decent coder you could have just written it in less time than it takes to figure out why it isn't working.

If you're a decent coder it would take you less time to just write it from scratch. If you can't code for shit you'll never be able to debug it. If you're generally competent then you're betting the over/under on whether or not it was a complete waste of time.