I would hate to see your code if you think ChatGPT’s code works great. I’m guessing you’ve never asked it do anything complex.

Its like anything else, in that if you aren’t getting good results working with ChatGPT, you simply might not be informed enough to ask the right questions. If you don’t know what the right question is to ask, or how to form it, you’ll get poor results. I’ve been working in my field long enough to know where almost all of the bodies are buried, so I don’t fall into the kinds of traps that novices do when they really don’t understand what they are doing (although its not always obvious to them that they don’t).

So this isn’t a real example, it’s just something I slapped together now as an example of how I generally use ChatGPT 4.0. In a more realistic scenario, I’d be asking more detailed questions, pasting in my existing code, and asking the AI to write smaller sections (maybe 10 lines of code at a time).

A single chat might run for five or six hours, continuously discussing an individual task I’m working on, and I won’t just be asking it to write a bunch code. For example in this case I might spend 10 minutes hashing out the exact contents of the ‘Activity’ record (or, maybe I already did that a month ago, and I might just paste in an example). I’d also be testing the code as I go and writing some of it myself, occasionally asking questions like ‘how do I format a date as 4 Feb 2016’ in JavaScript?’ or ‘this line of code fails with X. Why?’

In those five or six hours, I estimate I’m able to get two or three days of work done (at my level of productivity before I started paying $20/month for ChatGPT+).

I’m also only pasting the code - ChatGPT also explains the code it outputs, and often those explanations are more useful than the actual code.

In JavaScript write a “reserveSeat(‘A42’, ‘Adult’)” function that sends an ActivityStreams 2.0 activity to (this.apiUrl)/reserve and inform the user if it failed to be reserved

class SeatReservationService {
  constructor(apiUrl) {
    this.apiUrl = apiUrl;
  }

  async reserveSeat(seatNumber, seatType) {
    // Construct an ActivityStreams 2.0 compliant JSON object
    const activity = {
      '@context': 'https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams',
      'type': 'Reserve',
      'actor': {
        'type': 'Person',
        'name': 'User'
      },
      'object': {
        'type': 'Seat',
        'id': seatNumber,
        'category': seatType
      }
    };

    try {
      // Send the activity object to the specified API endpoint using an HTTP POST request
      const response = await fetch(`${this.apiUrl}/reserve`, {
        method: 'POST',
        headers: {
          'Content-Type': 'application/json'
        },
        body: JSON.stringify(activity)
      });

      // Handle the server’s response
      if (response.ok) {
        // If the request was successful, log a success message
        console.log('Seat reserved successfully.');
      } else {
        // If the server responds with a status code other than 2xx, throw an error
        throw new Error('Failed to reserve seat. Server responded with ' + response.status);
      }
    } catch (error) {
      // Inform the user if the reservation failed
      console.error('Failed to reserve seat:', error);
      alert('Failed to reserve the seat. Please try again.');
    }
  }
}

// Usage
const service = new SeatReservationService('https://example.com/api');
service.reserveSeat('A42', 'Adult');

Write a PHP request handler that does $this->reserveSeat(‘A42’), and checks if it failed with a SeatNotAvailable exception

class SeatNotAvailable extends Exception {
    public function __construct($message = "Seat not available", $code = 0, Exception $previous = null) {
        parent::__construct($message, $code, $previous);
    }
}

class SeatReservationService {

    public function reserveSeat($seatNumber) {
        // Mockup condition that the seat 'A42' is not available
        if ($seatNumber === 'A42') {
            throw new SeatNotAvailable("Seat $seatNumber is not available.");
        }

        // Normally here you'd interact with a database or another kind of storage
        // to actually reserve the seat.
        // ... (reserve seat logic) ...
        
        return true;
    }
}

class SeatReservationController {

    private $service;

    public function __construct() {
        $this->service = new SeatReservationService();
    }

    public function handleRequest() {
        try {
            $this->service->reserveSeat('A42');
            echo "Seat reserved successfully.";
        } catch (SeatNotAvailable $e) {
            echo $e->getMessage();
        }
    }
}

Write a PHPUnit test for SeatReservationController, and a Jest one for SeatReservationService

createMock(SeatReservationService::class);
        $serviceMock->method('reserveSeat')
                    ->willReturn(true);

        $controller = new SeatReservationController($serviceMock);
        $this->expectOutputString("Seat reserved successfully.");
        $controller->handleRequest();
    }

    public function testSeatNotAvailableException() {
        $serviceMock = $this->createMock(SeatReservationService::class);
        $serviceMock->method('reserveSeat')
                    ->will($this->throwException(new SeatNotAvailable()));

        $controller = new SeatReservationController($serviceMock);
        $this->expectOutputString("Seat not available");
        $controller->handleRequest();
    }
}

const SeatReservationService = require('./SeatReservationService'); // Adjust the path as necessary

test('reserves a seat successfully', async () => {
    const service = new SeatReservationService('https://example.com/api');
    global.fetch = jest.fn(() => 
        Promise.resolve({
            ok: true
        })
    );

    await service.reserveSeat('A41', 'Adult');
    expect(fetch).toHaveBeenCalledWith(
        'https://example.com/api/reserve', 
        expect.objectContaining({
            method: 'POST',
            headers: {
                'Content-Type': 'application/json'
            },
        })
    );
});

test('fails to reserve a seat', async () => {
    const service = new SeatReservationService('https://example.com/api');
    global.fetch = jest.fn(() => 
        Promise.resolve({
            ok: false,
            status: 400
        })
    );

    global.console = { error: jest.fn(), log: jest.fn() };

    await service.reserveSeat('A42', 'Adult');
    expect(console.error).toHaveBeenCalledWith(
        'Failed to reserve seat:', 
        expect.any(Error)
    );
});

You don’t, you get it to write both the code and the tests. And you read both of them yourself. And you run them in a debugger to verify they do what you expect.

Yeah, that’s half the work of “normal coding” but it’s also half the work. Which is a pretty awesome boost to productivity.

But where it really boosts your productivity is with APIs that you aren’t very familiar with. ChatGPT is a hell of a lot better than Google for simple “what API can I use for X” questions.

Yeah but I don’t. That’s the whole damn point.