Found a new use for ChatGPT: ancient code spelunking. I was working on the scale for my minute-by-minute rain graph and I remembered that I'd solved this in Check the Weather. Dug around in its ObjC source code and found the section responsible (which git tells me was written in April 2013).
It involved a complicated formula I didn't recognize or understand. So I asked ChatGPT what it meant and it did a surprisingly good job of giving me a starting point to now go and research again.
@_Davidsmith I’ve already heard “I don’t need to document my code now that we have LLMs” and it’s frustrating. Wouldn’t current you have been happier if past you had simply left a comment saying what the formula was and where you found it or how you came up with it?
@_Davidsmith In this case modern Swift code would be almost exactly the same (I mean the formula) but yeah, it would easily rewrite this part in Swift probably as well 🤷♂️
This is incredibly useful tool for some cases. It WON'T write the app for us, but can solve a lot of tedious and boring stuff - explaining it along the way! Awesome
@_Davidsmith that’s so cool! You could get the same info with a well-crafted query at a search engine and more effort, but for it to give you all that from one question, and all in-context? Incredible.
It’s nice to see LLMs being genuinely useful when a lot of the industry seem to be blindly shoehorning it in everywhere.
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