For things that are well covered on stack overflow, it's a strictly better search engine.
eg say you don't remember the syntax for a rails migration, or a regex, or something you're coding in bash, or processpool arguments in python. ChatGPT will often do a shockingly good job at answering those without you searching through random docs, stack overflow, all the bullshit google loves to throw at the top of search queries, etc yourself.
You can even paste in a bunch of your code and ask it to fill in something with context, at which it regularly does a shockingly good job. Or paste code and say you want a test that hits some specific aspect of the code.
And yeah, I don't really care if they train on the code I share -- figuring out the interaction of some stupid file upload lib with aws and cloudflare is not IP that I care about, and i chatgpt uses this to learn and save anyone else from the issues I was having, even a competitor, I'm happy for them.
For a real example:
> can you show me how to build a css animation? I'd like a bar, perhaps 20 pixels high, with a light blue (ideally bootstrap 5.3 colors) small gradient both vertically and horizontally, that 1 - fades in; 2 - starts on the left of the div and takes perhaps 20% of the div; 3 - grows to the right of the div; and 4 - loops
This got me 95% of where I wanted; I fiddled with the keyframe percents a bit and we use this in our product today. It spat out 30 lines of css that I absolutely could not have produced in under 2 hours.
And so now nobody is adding anything new to Stack Overflow, and thus ChatGPT will be forever stuck only being able to answer questions about pre-2024 tech.
Exactly. Even when it gives an answer that contains many mistakes, or doesn't work at all, I still get some valuable information out of it that does in the end save me a lot of time.
I'm so tired of constantly seeing remarks that basically boil down to "Look, I asked ChatGPT to do my job for me and it failed! What a piece of garbage! Ban AI!", which funnily enough mostly comes from people that fear that their job will be 100% replaced by an AI.
eg say you don't remember the syntax for a rails migration, or a regex, or something you're coding in bash, or processpool arguments in python. ChatGPT will often do a shockingly good job at answering those without you searching through random docs, stack overflow, all the bullshit google loves to throw at the top of search queries, etc yourself.
You can even paste in a bunch of your code and ask it to fill in something with context, at which it regularly does a shockingly good job. Or paste code and say you want a test that hits some specific aspect of the code.
And yeah, I don't really care if they train on the code I share -- figuring out the interaction of some stupid file upload lib with aws and cloudflare is not IP that I care about, and i chatgpt uses this to learn and save anyone else from the issues I was having, even a competitor, I'm happy for them.
For a real example:
> can you show me how to build a css animation? I'd like a bar, perhaps 20 pixels high, with a light blue (ideally bootstrap 5.3 colors) small gradient both vertically and horizontally, that 1 - fades in; 2 - starts on the left of the div and takes perhaps 20% of the div; 3 - grows to the right of the div; and 4 - loops
This got me 95% of where I wanted; I fiddled with the keyframe percents a bit and we use this in our product today. It spat out 30 lines of css that I absolutely could not have produced in under 2 hours.