I use Chatgpt for coding / API questions pretty frequently. It's bad at writing code with any kind of non-trivial design complexity.

There have been a bunch of times where I've asked it to write me a snippet of code, and it cheerfully gave me back something that doesn't work for one reason or another. Hallucinated methods are common. Then I ask it to check its code, and it'll find the error and give me back code with a different error. I'll repeat the process a few times before it eventually gets back to code that resembles its first attempt. Then I'll give up and write it myself.

As an example of a task that it failed to do: I asked it to write me an example Python function that runs a subprocess, prints its stdout transparently (so that I can use it for running interactive applications), but also records the process's stdout so that I can use it later. I wanted something that used non-blocking I/O methods, so that I didn't have to explicitly poll every N milliseconds or something.

Honestly I find that when GPT starts to lose the plot it's a good time to refactor and then keep on moving. "Break this into separate headers or modules and give me some YAML like markup with function names, return type, etc for each file." Or just use stubs instead of dumping every line of code in.

How long are you willing to iterate to get things right?

If it takes almost no cognitive energy, quite a while. Even if it's a little slower than what I can do, I don't care because I didn't have to focus deeply on it and have plenty of energy left to keep on pushing.

As my mother used to say, "I love work. I could watch it all day!"

I can see where you are coming from.

Maintaining a better creative + technical balance, instead of see-sawing. More continuous conscious planning, less drilling.

Plus the unwavering tireless help of these AI's seems psychologically conducive to maintaining one's own motivation. Even if I end up designing an elaborate garden estate or a simpler better six-axis camera stabilizer/tracker, or refactoring how I think of primes before attempting a theorem, ... when that was not my agenda for the day. Or any day.

I'm constantly having to go back and tell the AI about every mistake it makes and remind it not to reintroduce mistakes that were previously fixed. "no cognitive energy" is definitely not how I would describe that experience.

Sounds like the context window is getting pruned. Start a new chat fresh after you make significant changes.

That's presumably what o1-preview does? Iterates and checks the result. It takes much longer, but does indeed write slightly better code.