So using something once or twice is plenty to give it a fair shake?

How long did it take to learn how to use your first IDE effectively? Or git? Or basically any other tool that is the bedrock of software engineering.

AI fools people into thinking it should be really easy to get good results because the interface is so natural. And it can be for simple tasks. But for more complex tasks, you need to learn how to use it well.

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kemotep 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

So is it strictly necessary to sign up for the 200 a month subscription? Because every time, without fail, the free ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Mistral, Deepseek whatever chatbots, do not write PowerShell faster than I do.

They “type” faster than me, but they do not type out correct PowerShell.

Fake modules, out of date module versions, fake options, fake expectations of object properties. Debugging what they output makes them a significant speed down compared to just, typing and looking up PowerShell commands manually and using the -help and get-help functions in my terminal.

But again, I haven’t forked over money for the versions that cost hundreds of dollars a month. It doesn’t seem worth it, even after 3 years. Unless the paid version is 10 times smarter with significantly less hallucinations the quality doesn’t seem worth the price.

	▲	Aurornis 32 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> So is it strictly necessary to sign up for the 200 a month subscription? No, the $20/month plans are great for minimal use > Because every time, without fail, the free ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Mistral, Deepseek whatever chatbots, do not write PowerShell faster than I do. The exact model matters a lot. It's critical to use the best model available to avoid wasting time. The free plans generally don't give you the best model available. If they do, they have limited thinking tokens. ChatGPT won't give you the Codex (programming) model. You have to be in the $20/month plan or a paid trial. I recommend setting it to "High" thinking. Anthropic won't give you Opus for free, and so on. You really have to use one of the paid plans or a trial if you want to see the same thing that others are seeing.
	▲	azuanrb 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Not necessary. I use Claude/Chatgpt ~$20 plan. Then you'll get access to the cli tools, Claude Code and Codex. With web interface, they might hallucinate because they can't verify it. With cli, it can test its own code and keep iterating on it. That's one of the main difference.
	▲	johnfn an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		No, it's not necessary to pay 200/mo. I haven't had an issue with a hallucination in many months. They are typically a solved problem if you can use some sort of linter / static analysis tool. You tell the agent to run your tool(s) and fix all the errors. I am not familiar with PowerShell at all, but a quick GPT tells me that there is PSScriptAnalyzer, which might be good for this. That being said, it is possible that PowerShell is too far off the beaten path and LLMs aren't good at it. Try it again with something like TypeScript - you might change your mind.

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drw85 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It can also backfire and sometimes give you absolute made-up nonsense. Or waste your whole day moving in a circle around a problem.