Declining Performance for Coding on ChatGPT

Remember when ChatGPT first came out and everyone was amazed by its coding skills? It was like having an incredibly smart coding partner who could help you with all sorts of programming tasks. But lately, I’ve noticed that ChatGPT’s performance on coding has really gone downhill.

Over the past few months, I’ve seen a lot of users complaining about issues with ChatGPT’s coding abilities. Things like simple syntax errors, or the model just not understanding even basic coding concepts. It’s kind of painful to watch, to be honest.

For example, I saw a video where someone was trying to get ChatGPT to write a simple Python script, and it was really struggling. The code it produced had all sorts of problems. Video link here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhU96IU0KwQ&ab_channel=CodingwithDee

This isn’t just one isolated incident either. On forums and subreddits, I’ve seen tons of people talking about how ChatGPT has “gotten worse” at coding over time. Some say they have to “dumb down” their prompts just to get the model to understand what they’re asking.

I’ve had my own frustrating experiences with this too. Recently I asked ChatGPT for some simple instructions on setting up a local web server and Redis instance using a Dockerfile. But no matter how the prompt was phrased, the model couldn’t get it right. Very disappointing, especially since I know it could do that kind of thing easily just last year. This is also done on the ChatGPT-4o API which is their paid service and not the free version.

So what’s going on here? Well (I’m speculating here), a likely explanation is that Microsoft, the company behind ChatGPT, has had to cut costs somewhere. Running a huge AI model like this requires a ton of computing power, and that’s not cheap. It seems possible that Microsoft has had to scale back the resources devoted to ChatGPT, and that’s causing its performance to suffer, especially on more technical tasks.

It’s a real shame to see ChatGPT’s coding abilities decline like this. It was such a useful tool, especially for developers. If this downward trend continues, a lot of people are going to have to start using alternatives like Claude or Llama. The ChatGPT coding magic seems to be fading, at least for now.

Despite its current struggles, I still believe ChatGPT has a chance to reclaim its top spot if it can turn things around, and with the upcoming release of ChatGPT-5, we might see a significant resurgence in performance – so, it’s definitely not out of the running yet.