I feel like I lost a work companion.
I wrote a very long and detailed comment about the same experience that unfortunately got removed because I honestly got a little to salty.
I went full time into learning how to code 6 months ago and ChatGPT was so important in that journey that it really felt like a coding buddy.
I could pitch ideas or questions and it would just deliver every time.
Since around November it straight up doesn’t work for coding related tasks,
it’s like they added a directive like “Do not provide help to construct code or scripts” because it’s not an issue of the model not understanding what you request.
You can give it an extremely detailed prompt with clear instructions that it will happily confirm and give a summary of - and then not follow.
“All code provided should be fully constructed, do not leave comment lines instructing the user to fill out the rest. Comments in the code is not allowed, examples is not allowed, the code should be working as-is and your task is to provide the manual labor of completing the list following the clear instructions provided.”
Result: "// Repeat for the other variables "
“Remove the comments and complete the code for all variables”
Result: Gives the same code
“Do not provide any code unless explicitly requested to do so, and do not repeat code already provided. I want to discuss X before we start constructing the script”
Result: "Yes, you can do it like this: → Gives faulty code
The list just goes on and on, it will ignore simple and clear instructions the very next response without a care in the world. It’s maddening, because it used to work so very well so its’ hard to shake the feeling that you could get it to work - but at some point it finally becomes obvious that you aren’t using something even close to what you previously worked with.
My biggest issue is how it’s apparently perfectly fine for a subscription based service to severely reduce the quality of the product provided without clearly communicating what is happening and why. I subscribed for a very functional product, and rather than the service improving with time they figured they could provide less while charging the same. All these extra utilities and functionality they keep adding are useless when the core product is getting worse.
My current bet is that they either figured they were at a point when they have such a dominant market position with no real competition for average users that they no longer need to impress and can save costs by providing bara minimum (A Pokémon game approach) - or they have deals with some big entities to provide only them with the premium product and remove the access for average users.
These are only theories, but because they aren’t communicating with their paying users properly it’s hard to argue against because there’s not really anything to go on other than the fact that it has gotten significantly worse.
I mean come on, ChatGPT and AI in general has some of the most frenzied fans that will defend it with their last breath, and even they are silent because there’s no room to even try and argue that it hasn’t gotten significantly worse.
I still tries to use 3.5 from time to time for some simple coding task to save time, but it has reached a point where even that isn’t viable anymore - odds are you will spend more time fighting it to do as you want then it would have taken to simply manually do what the model previously could have done for you in a second.
Shame really.