Please remove it if unallowed

I see alot of people in here who get mad at AI generated code and I am wondering why. I wrote a couple of bash scripts with the help of chatGPT and if anything, I think its great.

Now, I obviously didnt tell it to write the entire code by itself. That would be a horrible idea, instead, I would ask it questions along the way and test its output before putting it in my scripts.

I am fairly competent in writing programs. I know how and when to use arrays, loops, functions, conditionals, etc. I just dont know anything about bash’s syntax. Now, I could have used any other languages I knew but chose bash because it made the most sense, that bash is shipped with most linux distros out of the box and one does not have to install another interpreter/compiler for another language. I dont like Bash because of its, dare I say weird syntax but it made the most sense for my purpose so I chose it. Also I have not written anything of this complexity before in Bash, just a bunch of commands in multiple seperate lines so that I dont have to type those one after another. But this one required many rather advanced features. I was not motivated to learn Bash, I just wanted to put my idea into action.

I did start with internet search. But guides I found were lacking. I could not find how to pass values into the function and return from a function easily, or removing trailing slash from directory path or how to loop over array or how to catch errors that occured in previous command or how to seperate letter and number from a string, etc.

That is where chatGPT helped greatly. I would ask chatGPT to write these pieces of code whenever I encountered them, then test its code with various input to see if it works as expected. If not, I would ask it again with what case failed and it would revise the code before I put it in my scripts.

Thanks to chatGPT, someone who has 0 knowledge about bash can write bash easily and quickly that is fairly advanced. I dont think it would take this quick to write what I wrote if I had to do it the old fashioned way, I would eventually write it but it would take far too long. Thanks to chatGPT I can just write all this quickly and forget about it. If I want to learn Bash and am motivated, I would certainly take time to learn it in a nice way.

What do you think? What negative experience do you have with AI chatbots that made you hate them?

  • nfms@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    OP was able to write a bash script that works… on his machine 🤷 that’s far from having to review and send code to production either in FOSS or private development.

    • petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      I also noticed that they were talking about sending arguments to a custom function? That’s like a day-one lesson if you already program. But this was something they couldn’t find in regular search?

      Maybe I misunderstood something.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        4·
        2 months ago

        Exactly. If you understand that functions are just commands, then it’s quite easy to extrapolate how to pass arguments to that function:

        function my_func () {
    echo $1 $2 $3  # prints a b c
}

my_func a b c

        Once you understand that core concept, a lot of Bash makes way more sense. Oh, and most of the syntax I provided above is completely unnecessary, because Bash…