Hundreds of hours of work saved thanks to ChatGPT.
We have a shared drive at work that contains our engineering drawings in PDF. That shared folder is 20 years old as it has been migrated over and over. It’s a mess of obsolete part drawings and irrelevant things over 13k files.
I was able to compile a list of part numbers that are actually in use from our ERP data. I asked ChatGPT to give me a script to transfer files not on that list to an archive folder. I got a solid result to start, then I asked ChatGPT to make a couple of changes to the code, which it obliged. I ran a test to confirm the function, then ran it for real. 13k files became 1700, the rest preserved in an archive.
I have a limited coding background from way back in C, so this task was outside my capabilities. But with a Python script I was able to use and read, it was amazing seeing many days of work done in a couple of minutes.
Indeed, this is the very sort of work that welcomes machine intervention. When you finish writing a program using ChatGPT, give it this prompt: ‘Write a software engineering program specification for this program.’ The result is excellent.
I know zero HTML and JavaScript, and I have zero desire to learn those languages. I’m currently making a web app and just asking ChatGPT to write those parts of the app for me. If I run into an error, I just post the error and it corrects it for me. I’m probably going to finish this app and still have zero knowledge of HTML and JavaScript.
See, I ask ChatGPT how to write an Excel formula to list how many items are overdue in a spreadsheet. It saved me hours of work. I obviously get paid less than you.
I also use ChatGPT for scripting. It is an amazing assistant. That’s great! I’m interested to give it a list of all the files and folders in my G drive and see if it can recommend a better folder structure and put together solid suggestions of where to put the files, in the root directory.
Up the living definition of work smart, not hard. And just like that, engineering internships everywhere have disappeared.
I absolutely agree with you. I’m in the same boat. ChatGPT is not as useful for people who are masters at coding, but for us with very little coding experience who aren’t trying to get a coding job, it’s a godsend. I’ve been able to create like 30 apps that help my business and personal life. It literally saves me hundreds of hours. Business is booming. I now have 15 employees. Life is good.
Now imagine if you just had to describe what you wanted and an AI agent would then figure out how to do it, write the script, and execute it on your machine safely. Thank goodness, now I can spend my time doing more important things, like scrolling through Reddit.
Congrats! I work in a state-of-the-art tech company. They just banned all AI assistants because they’re scared of being sued. Looking for a new job.
I have a basic intermediate knowledge in a few programming languages, but have been using ChatGPT for coding tasks and I’m really surprised at the results. It’s also making it so I don’t have to think and problem solve as much, which is not such a good thing.
Companies are afraid of what they are uploading to ChatGPT. I’m glad I can finally focus on my true calling: napping.
Yep, yep. I’m fairly new to programming, so for my skill level, this is magic to me. I can see how the veterans here won’t get that much out of it, but as a noob, this is life on cheat mode.
Now you need to shut up and not tell your boss about this. Take a few days off and enjoy your time.
Similar thing for me. ChatGPT created me a PowerShell script to convert files from our software into the format required by our online banking platform. My options were either 1. pay the software company probably two thousand pounds to do it, 2. pay a developer to write me the script for probably one thousand pounds, 3. learn how to do it myself, probably 40 hours as I don’t know the syntax, or 4. ask ChatGPT. All working in 40 minutes.
I’m not the best English speaker, so I use this tool every time when I need to talk in video conferences. Ha ha ha.
Don’t tell your boss and go on holiday during that time that you were working on the problem.
Amazing until worker productivity expectations are raised to meet and then eventually exceed what you are able to do with ChatGPT, with no increase in pay.
Now you wait until it has the ability to understand the content of all of the files: docs, spreadsheets, drawings, etc., and then tell it to organize and properly re-label everything in that archive.
Explain like I’m five. I cannot understand a word, but this seems really interesting and helpful. Could someone explain it to me in layman terms from the beginning?
I’m a university professor, and I love ChatGPT. I was able to redo my syllabus in a few hours versus a few days.
I love it! Most of the time, other times I’ve had it brick whole VMs. Really, I’ve found that it’s great for learning how to code yourself. You can make it give you the same kind of prompts you give to it and have it grade the responses you give. Human training AI, training human.
I use it to code Arduino. Many visions of mine coming to life.
When I see vision, I don’t mean some secret work. Just internet projects I couldn’t code for.
Don’t tell your boss. All you’re gonna get is more work.
Anyone got replaced by a bot yet?
I tried asking ChatGPT to optimize a browser extension I made a few years ago with minimal knowledge, but it kept giving me code that didn’t work. This thread is inspiring me to try again.
Half of the posts here, like this one, are acting as if ChatGPT invented the internet. It saved you hundreds of hours of work? Really? So you’re saying you would have done it manually otherwise? Come on, otherwise you would have used Google and it would have taken a bit longer.
But of course, that would have worked too. This is just ridiculous.
So companies can squeeze out even more from the employees who will have even less time, as with every other tech from the last 20 years.
LOL, definitely not hundreds of hours of work. To be fair, you saved maybe 10 hours because you could have achieved the same thing with Google and a bit of work.
But you’re a lazy boy, aren’t you? What prevented you from just copying and pasting to another folder?
IDK, man. I’ve been a pro developer for over 10 years, and I cannot get over this sense of unease with it. I’m glad it helps with certain small tasks and things, but I gotta believe someone somewhere is going to over-rely on an AI-fed script.
It’s difficult enough to get juniors to fix issues in code that they’ve written. I worry we’re going to end up with a bunch more copy-paste coders who don’t actually know what they’re doing.
Me too, fellow person. I’ve been riding motorized skateboards and cannons and baking confections with nutrition since the computers shared brains. It’s like totally cool to have help, nah mean? We should vote it for president forever, and the future will be painless. Taylor Swift, shut up.
Got an engineering drawing exam today. Yours is today’s first post I saw. Peeved.
