Summary: It has actually been a few months since my site came into existence. But being a newcomer to Lemmy I thought I’d post my experience once again here.

I had close to zero experience in web site development. I had never written a line of code in PHP nor used a PostgreSQL database, let alone creating and managing one.

However, I thought this lack of experience made me a good candidate to test just how powerful ChatGPT is. After two weeks of on-and-off construction, I finally completed a completely functional website that serves as an “online guest book” and is open for everyone to try out. A feat that I probably could never have achieved without any help.

Here are some of the amazing highlights of how ChatGPT helped:

  • Debugging - I took the approach of using a website design software and incorporating snippets provided by ChatGPT. Very often, that would lead to unknown errors, and I just found myself copying and pasting the entire file and giving one single word of instruction to ChatGPT - debug. Time and again, it managed to pinpoint the errors after a few back and forths.

  • Geolocation and other features - I just told ChatGPT what I wanted to do, and it pointed me in the right direction very quickly. In the case of geolocation, it led me to the right library to use that I had no idea about (geoip geolite2), walked me through the procedure to install it on my NAS, and got it up and running within something like one hour. I am absolutely certain it would have taken me days if not weeks to get it going given my programming background or lack thereof.

  • Backend admin site (that only I get to use so no fancy formatting required) - I did not even have to write a single line of code for it. I just told ChatGPT what I wanted the backend admin site to do, and it churned out 4 files for me just like that (with the usual problem of stopping midway through then having to encourage it to continue). I told ChatGPT what errors I encountered with the files, and it kept revising the code until it started running smoothly after a few tries. Two hours later, the backend admin site was done.

Anyway, give this site a try and see what you think: https://www.stringtone.com. The concept is simple, and all of the intelligence and many of the security measures came directly from ChatGPT.

It has been a fun project, but yes, I still have no clue how I can construct something similar without getting ChatGPT’s help.

  • relevants@feddit.deEnglish
    183·
    1 year ago

    ChatGPT definitely has the potential to put web developers out of a job !

    Great example of actual dunning kruger. No serious web developer can be replaced by even the best currently available GPT model and we have no guarantee that its reasoning abilities will keep improving at the current rate in future models.

    It’s cool that you were able to do this but it wouldn’t have taken long for you to learn the skills necessary to do this yourself instead…

  • stevedidWHAT@lemmy.worldEnglish
    131·
    1 year ago

    Imo, gpt’s coding ability is for rudimentary/basic code chunks at best. Anything semi complex gets totally missed, bugged, or just flat out hallucinated.

    Wish they’d go back to their coding specific gpt model but alas

    • seemebreakthis@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      Wild guess - their paid version, and / or ChatGPT 4.0, can handle more complex requests?

      But yes my site has a very basic set of features, and gpt was only required to provide short code chunks to make it work. I can imagine it getting choked up with more complex requests that require iterations of modifications.

      • stevedidWHAT@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        I have access to the gpt 4.0 and it’s definitely better in a lot of ways but the coding is still painfully limited

        Makes sense tho imo, the last thing I need is an ai that can change its code and refactor itself lolol

        • Eheran@lemmy.world
          1·
          1 year ago

          The in least weeks, it felt like GPT4 got a lot better. Working code in the first try, over and over again. Adding this or that, boom done.

          • stevedidWHAT@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            Again, it’s been my experience that at best gpt is only capable of rudimentary code and not at all anything complex in this lightest unless it copies a preexisting algorithm word for word (anyone can do this and recall on this would be as simple as owning a few coding books and searching their glossary or index.

            Hope to see a future where it’s coding capabilities (even if like the old codex model and is separated) are excellent and we can all make cool stuffs together

    • ShitEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      It’s pretty good at making functions and basic program layouts like make a go program to do x with a docker compose file to run it but it hardly ever runs correctly the first time. You’re right it can get confused or just totally hallucinate or refactor longer code.

      Disclosure I did have it write me a html/css professional webpage and all the text and a prompt for an ai image it needed for the layout in a single paragraph prompt. It all turned out pretty good sounding and looking. I was surprised I replaced my old one with it.

        • ShitEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Yeah I know but it’s pretty much the same for chatgpt html/c/ASM/python all the same to a language model

          • stevedidWHAT@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            Mmmm

            I have to disagree. Namely because it’s infeasible to actually know what’s going on in the inner layer of the neural network so saying that two different items are processed the same way using the same routes.

            If this were true, it’s scores would be the same across the board - something are inherently “harder” (takes longer to calculate/traverse the neural net for, or are actually impossible)

            • ShitEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯ it’s a language model it’s all the same for it. Granted it depends on it’s training set for how accurate it is. And the context window is pretty small with chatgpt, codex does a better job with longer code samples since you can increase the context window size and the training set is more code based.

              • stevedidWHAT@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                1 year ago

                Codex is not available anymore though that’s my qualm.

                I don’t think copilot is codex either the more I think about it I’m pretty sure that’s GitHub’s or Gotland own thing

                It might even be ms/azures own model

                • ShitEnglish
                  2·
                  1 year ago

                  I wasn’t really disagreeing outside that to the model everything is just language. I just want to keep saying not magic just a large language model with a huge manicured training set.

                  Have you looked into running llama.cpp at home with a model trained on code? Some of them work pretty well and you can play with some stuff chatgpt abstracts away. You can even try to train/fine-tune model on your code if you have enough and a relatively new GPU.

                  It’s slow but all you need is lots of ram and a CPU no GPU nessassary.

  • mrmanager@lemmy.todayEnglish
    10·
    1 year ago

    I use chatgpt a lot and it’s often saving me time, but you could not replace a programmer with it. Your company would be helpless as soon as it’s answer is incorrect or buggy, which it often is.

    I view it more like my guide, someone to bounce ideas with and help me do boring tasks like converting one format to another or whatever.

    Sometimes it teaches me the correct format for something too and that saves a lot of time.

  • rishabh@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    Haha, if you look at the guest book, you see so many people just trying to check if you sanitize your inputs.