The old code isn’t going anywhere, there are already countless backups and clones. For a fork to actually be meaningful it needs community support and maintainers otherwise it’s basically just a clone.

If you’re doing more complex stuff all the time then yes that’s an indication of a problem, but despite your best efforts, complex situations or screw ups do happen and it’s good to know how to fix them, especially if you’re a senior dev that needs to help the rest of the team and resolve conflicts between feature branches. The whole team can’t be perfect all the time.

Also most of the tips in the article aren’t even about branch management and more about optimizations for huge projects or introspection into the history of large projects.

What annoys me the most is that AI image generators make it so easy to make images and yet despite that they’re still too lazy to spend 2 seconds to look at the image and check if it’s crap or not. It would literally take them only a couple of minutes to tweak the prompt and regenerate some more images.

Oh, well of course that’s fine. The government is talking about software that is used for important systems. No hacker will even know about your personal side project.

Even the best programmers are going to make mistakes at times. Saying the solution is to just be perfect all the time is impossible.

let me feel sort of creative in the way I do things

🚩

Definitely depends on the type of question. I find for documentation type questions I get the 90% good answers, like how do I do something with this library, it’s good, which makes sense because that libraries documentation is probably in the training data. But for more open ended questions, like how do I solve this problem, I see similar performance to what you’re saying. I think it’s a good retrieval and synthesises tool which can really save a ton of time if you already have a high level plan of action and just use it to fill in some specific details.

I’ve found it great for asking documentation questions. It saves me a ton of time having to search through documentation myself. The problem is when it encounters something it doesn’t have information on, it’ll just confidently make shit up, and if you’re not enough of an expert to recognize when that happens, you can be mislead. It still saves me time, but I use it as a recall tool to get me started when I’m learning to do something new, I’d never use the code it puts out without reading through it line by line. I’m also experienced enough to know when it’s wrong and how to refactor its examples. People new to programming could get set down the wrong path by over relying on gpt to teach them.

I’ve gotten really good results asking chat gpt for programming help. Problem is that it’s wrong like 10% of the time, and when it’s wrong it’s very confidently incorrect. That wasn’t a problem for me because I knew when it was wrong and could course correct it and get the correct solution and it still saved me time and helped me eventually get to the right solution. But if someone who’s still getting started is trying to use chat gpt to learn, they could easily be mislead because they won’t know when its output is wrong.