If you think those industries work on the competency of their programmers instead of the competency of their systems you’ve got a big surprise coming for you

I don’t think my experience is standalone in this. People will use tools to help them however they can. What sector a programmer in will likely have no affect on AI use. It may be harder to use on a secure network but people can still do it on their phone or personal computer. And medical and aerospace is heavily regulated and tested so the likelihood of bad AI code getting through is very low. (not to say coding mistakes don’t happen, just look at the boeing 737 max crashes) And militaries also test their equipment before/after purchase. While they are often held to different standards than commercial equipment a military usually has people who are competent reviewing code and equipment.

It depends how you use it, I think, like any tool. I might ask ChatGPT to help me write an algorithm to do a certain thing in pseudocode so I can understand it. Ask it a few questions about optimization just so I have a sense for how it works then I implement it myself.

It can also help you think about ideas. I will copy paste a function or file and then ask questions like “what are some considerations do you think I should have?” “is there anything I could be missing?” “what could make this code better?” “how would you optimize this?” “how would you make it simpler?”

let me find some simple example

function findAbsoluteMax(arr) {
  return arr.reduce((val, next) => {
    if (Math.abs(next) > Math.abs(val)) {
      return next;
    } else {
      return val;
    }
  });
}

Let’s ask GPT4 “how could we make this code better?”

It offers two suggestions

1. there should be some simple error handling. for example if the arr is length 0 then it should throw an error or return a null. this makes sense and is a good thing to add - perhaps this would have saved me a lot of headache in some scenario where I’m getting a weird bug

2. add a ternary operator to make the arr.reduce call shorter

   return arr.reduce((val, next) => Math.abs(next) > Math.abs(val) ? next : val );

I think this does actually make it more readable and condenses it - a pretty good thing

Now, this is a simple function but you can actually copy in a whole file and ask it to analyze things you might be missing or considerations you could make. It’s like talking to the yellow duck except the yellow duck talks back

There’s a lot of power in this technology and it doesn’t simply revolve around copy pasting code. Perhaps my example wasn’t the greatest but someone else can share how they use it