I spent all day comparing Bard vs ChatGPT 4. Here are the results (Software Developer Questions)

I'm a software engineer at a startup with impossible deadlines - I've used GPT4 for months to generate huge amounts app/server code, and much like your IDE, once you learn to use these tools you don't want to go back to the days without it.

Speed

• Bard is very fast- similar to GPT 3.5 Turbo
• You need to multitask two GPT4 instances side by side to compensate for how slow GPT4 can be

Reliability

• Bard lies and makes up fake API calls more than GPT4

UI

• Bard UI is garbage - You have to keep manually scrolling down the chat window, and for some reason the largest button on the page is "stop" (???)
• You can tell Bard to modify its response to be longer/shorter and a few other options - I thought this would be useful, but it never ended up helping

Memory

• Bard has really short memory - Forgets details from last response!
• GPT4 memory is also unreliable, any details that are important you have to repeat

Intelligence

• GPT4 is objectively smarter

Internet Search

• GPT4 Internet search is garbage
• Bard has "Verify with Google" - I had high hopes for this, but never actually had a use for it

Willingness to give full code

• GPT4 is bad, but Bard is worse. Both need to be begged/threatened to return more than 100 lines of directly paste-able code.

Generating Useful Code

• Bard can give more concise medium complexity functions

Adding tougher features

• Bard hallucinates and lies

Dealing with lies

• When you tell GPT something doesn't work, GPT will try something else
• When you tell Bard something doesn't work, Bard will lie, claim to fix it, then give back the same code

Following Instructions

• GPT4 sometimes doesn't follow instructions, but improving the prompt will fix that. Bard will happily ignore instructions, as clear as they may be.

Summary:

• GPT4 is still objectively better than Bard. Quite frankly, the prompts Bard couldn't handle, GPT3.5 could.
• The cons of GPT can be worked around, but for Bard, it's almost faster to do it yourself. Unless Bard was used like Copilot for short 1-2 lines of autocomplete, I wouldn't trust it.

PS: If you're not using AI yet for development, I highly recommend it - It's like using an IDE instead of Notepad. AI can easily 2-3x your output, but you have to learn how it works so you can prompt it correctly, and you have be good at fixing its mistakes.