Sharing my experience with ChatGPT and Phoenix 1.7.2

Pfew…,I had a hard time trying to follow the book Functional web developement _elixir_otp_phoenix by Lance Halvorsen, and I gotta tell ya. Chat GPT have no clue about these new features in the latest releases. I am a nubie to elixir and phoenix. But I like legos and dont mind to ready a 400 pages book in 3 days. I went the old way. Reading docs and trying , failing, rereading and and trying again.

Now I have the game of Islands working with phoenix 1.7.2.
I feel like I learn a lot. And I now undestand the core ideas of phoenix and 3 OTP behaviours , Genserver , Supervisor and Application.
I start to question if nubies should ever use AI to learn to code.
Peace.

4 Likes

That’s not surprising given Chat GPT works on years old input. At that time much of the new stuff of phoenix 1.7 didn’t exist yet.

this is a great question. one that i ponder myself. interesting to know your experience.

for sure i can imagine that if you can’t code yourself then it’s impossible to know if the AI output makes any sense or not, so it would probably waste a lot of time and save none.

i’m also curious if after you’ve got the basics down the AI would be of more help? i use it mostly to write algos that would take time for me to figure out, but other coders have done many times over. and rarely do i go looking for ideas on what/how to do anything, which is what a junior would perhaps need.

anyway i’d love to hear more once you get even deeper into this.

For the record: Bing AI is aware of the latest releases. I’ve been using it a lot recently.

1 Like

ChatGPT can work for some things in Elixir, but a lot of Phoenix / Liveview will just confuse it because of a lot of the updates just randomly change the syntax orders.

It will do stuff like “<%= example %>” instead of {example} which will cause errors.