Hot take: People who find ChatGPT not useful either haven’t used it enough or have an ego problem. To clarify, I’m a developer and I am impressed by how many of my colleagues think it is not useful or don’t use it yet. I’m talking about ChatGPT. It’s like living with a life hack open for everyone to use, but people simply don’t use it or don’t understand how to use it.
ChatGPT makes software engineering so much better. I can focus on the large problems in architecture while letting ChatGPT handle the minutia. It generates UTC timestamps, helps with Python code, and even assists with dependency injection. I use it every day and I don’t even attempt to prompt it or whatever everyone is calling it. I’ll literally just type something like ‘Java print out entries in map’ or ‘Linux move file’ and it provides me with the solution.
I guess I’m just using it at a surface level, so I don’t typically run into any issues. But as a developer, I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment that discovering ChatGPT felt like I grew a second brain. It genuinely baffles me how some can just shrug this off. It’s their loss, my gain.
I think it’s a godsend. I’ve moved from industrial programming to ChatGPT, and it’s amazing. I go to it before any search engine. I think it’s people that don’t know how to properly use it that is the issue. I also find being polite and treating it as an equal helps. One thing I love is the new tuning options. LOL, I have mine in the style of Bob from The Bobbyverse series of books, with a sarcastic sense of humor.
I’m an English teacher, and I’m teaching effective prompting. I know students use it, and I might as well show them how to use it. We’re having some fun moments using scripts like Professor Synapse. I can’t tell you how awesome it is to hand a poor outline or incorrectly phrased sentence back to a student and have them ask an AI for suggestions.
For the last 25 years, I had always been struck by the fear that students would either get frustrated if I didn’t give them enough direction, or they would just copy my direction and not learn. ChatGPT threatens people’s egos, that’s the bottom line. And there’s a large chunk out there that see it as a threat. But lots of people are out there solving real problems with it.
I don’t code or anything, but it’s absurdly helpful to my life. It’ll have three ingredients in my fridge, and it’ll give me a long list of how I can use them. If I am ever doing any task, I’ll just tell ChatGPT, and it’ll give me the most efficient way to do it.
I agree, they are just standing in a forest trying to ignore the trees. There is the half for which it is an ego problem, and there is the other half that, despite being programmers, are not able to break down problems in self-contained chunks or just generally struggle with non-ambiguous prompts.
Why I use other models instead of ChatGPT: One, it’s censored as a free speech. Absolution as a result, I am morally opposed to censorship. Two, it’s not private. I don’t like having people privy to my conversations. Three, Llama 2 now has a coding version and functions just the same as ChatGPT. Four, it’s not ego. I just have a workstyle that isn’t dependent on technology as much as the average person.
For someone like me, what is it useful for? I’m genuinely asking. Also, I’ve never used ChatGPT, only the free version. Is there any benefit to upgrading?
