Funny enough, I’d been wanting to learn some assembly for my M1 MacBook but had given up after attempts at googling for help as I ran into really basic issues and since I was just messing around and had plenty of actually productive things to work on.
A few sessions with ChatGPT sorted out various platform specific things and within tens of minutes I was popping stacks and conditionally jumping to my heart’s delight.
Yup, ChatGPT is, paradoxically, MOST USEFUL in areas you already know something about. It's easy to nudge it (chat) towards the actual answers you're looking for.
Nontrivial problem solutions are wishful thinking hallucinations, eg. I ask it for some way to use AWS service X and it comes up with a perfect solution - that I spend 10 minutes desperately trying to uncover - and find out that it doesn't exist and I've wasted 15 minutes of my life. "Nudging it" with followups how it's described solutions violate some common patterns on the platform, it doubles down on it's bullshit by inventing other features that would support the functionality. It's the worst when what you're trying to do can't really be done with constraints specified.
It gives out bullshit reasoning and code, eg. I wanted it to shorten some function I spitballed and it made the code both subtly wrong (by switching to unordered collection) and slower (switching from list to hash map with no benefit). And then even claims it's solution is faster because it avoids allocations ! (where my solution was adding new KeyValuePair to the list, which is a value type and doesn't actually allocate anything). I can easily see a newbie absorbing this BS - you need background knowledge to break it down. Or another example I wanted to check the rationale behind some lint warning, not only was it off base but it even said some blatantly wrong facts in the process (like default equality comparison in C# being ordinal ignore case ???).
In my experience working with junior/mid members the amount of half assed/seemingly working solutions that I had to PR in last couple of months has increased and a lot (along with "shrug ChatGPT wrote it").
Maybe in some areas like ASM for a specific machine there's not a lot of newbie friendly material and ChatGPT can grok it correctly (or it's easy to tweak the outputs because you know what it should look like) - but that's not the case for gamedev. Like there are multiple books titled "math for game developers" (OP use case).
Oh, ChatGPT is terrible at actually doing things with ASM in general. It was just good at the boilerplate.
If anyone can get ChatGPT to write the ASM to reverse a string, please show me an example! I’m still having to get out a pad and paper or sit in lldb to figure out how to do much of anything in ASM, same as it has always been!
A few sessions with ChatGPT sorted out various platform specific things and within tens of minutes I was popping stacks and conditionally jumping to my heart’s delight.