Duncan Campbell, a non-programmer, describes building a wholesale battery dispatch optimization script using ChatGPT on the Catalyst podcast.
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Campbell: AI will not replace software engineers but make individuals team-scale
“I don't see this replacing software engineers. Just as it empowered me, like I very much see a great software engineer just using this to save a ton of time, right? Telling it exactly what to do with a level of specificity about programming that I could never …”
Insight
Campbell: Building complex software with ChatGPT requires iterative prompting
“It's very hard to kind of, like, top-down build it, because there's a bunch of little errors everywhere. It's, like, hard to track what's going on. And I pretty quickly reverted to, like, bottom-up building it. Like, building one element, like, slowly working …”
Insight
Campbell: ChatGPT operates like a fast junior engineer needing domain guidance
“ChatGTP is not like a ten-year industry veteran with deep domain expertise, right? It's a decent sort of like Junior software engineer, and its benefit is that it's very fast, right? But you can't just sort of like let it take the reins and run with the proble…”
Insight
Campbell: Blindly prompting LLMs to debug code leads to nonsensical rabbit holes
“In debugging, if you kind of just, like, keep prompting it, like, fix this, here's the error, like, here's the message I'm getting back in error, and you just kind of, like, assume it's gonna be smart. You can wind up in, like, rabbit holes that just don't mak…”
Insight
Campbell: ChatGPT's 'permaflow' eliminates human context-switching penalties
“Every time you go back to you know, chat.openai.com and go into this chat, It has a perfect state of where it was previously, right? So I said four or five hours of continuous work, but in reality, it was a bunch of 45 minute segments. And I didn't have to lik…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Campbell: LLMs will empower Excel and systems thinkers across the energy industry
“Energy industry is full of people who are like great at Excel and really good at systems thinking, but are not programmers. So I think you could see a lot of people empowered by this.”