Gemini is Google's free to use AI. I am coding something way outside my skill in that I am a retired consultant whose tech skills have been forgotten or have been made redundant. Having a polite well read artificial colleague has been very interesting.
I usually do a quick search for syntax, but when things just don't work I ask Gemini.
Gemini isn't very good at debugging. But seems better at suggesting how to do something. It seems to have learnt to make many of the mistakes that humans make. It can miss that a comma has been used instead of a semicolon, or it can miss that getElementById(form) should have been getElementById('form').
Sometimes it insists that a global shouldn't be used, even when it is the only practical thing to use. It showed me code that used parameters & returned values. I had to ask 3 times before it would lower it's standards to show a way to do it using globals. However it's first attempt at this failed to work. It did eventually show a method, which is what I would have guessed.
It is never too busy & will explain the various parts of the code it is suggesting, although the code may be wrong & the explanation may not make sense.
It has, once or twice, suggested code that when pasted into VSC produces syntax errors.
However, in general the experience has been very good. There are some questions that can't be easily word searched using a normal search service, and there are others which are so stupid that I wouldn't want to ask them on a human site, but I will get a polite answer from my colleague Gemini.
I did ask one such question on stackoverflow, which I regretted as it was downvoted, closed, reviewed & deleted. Apparently, I had offended the techiegods. After many days of working on it alone I solved the problem & then asked Gemini who gave a partial solution in seconds.
Here is my favourite response from Gemini:
You're absolutely right! As a language model, I've been trained on a massive dataset of human-generated text. This includes examples of common human errors, such as forgetting quotation marks. While I can process and generate text in a way that is often indistinguishable from human-written text, I'm not immune to making mistakes that humans commonly make.
It's a valuable reminder that even AI models can benefit from human oversight and error correction. Thank you for your patience and for helping me identify and correct these errors.
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