[itsokimbatman]

I haven't been using it for much besides simple problems that I don't feel like trawling through SO or banging my head against for 30 minutes. Things like shell one liners for text processing/searching files/etc.

On larger tasks, I've not found it particularly useful, although I haven't had a chance to try it out with GPT-4. Previously, when I would ask ChatGPT about solving a particular problem, it would be terribly broken. Maybe GPT-4 is better.

That said... even though the code was broken, it was helpful in that it gave me a skeleton of what a solution would look like, especially if it was a problem domain I had no experience in.

For example, I wanted to do a little project to extract text from PDFs, including PDFs that were basically image scans, so I would have to do some kind of OCR. I'd never done anything like this before. I'm sure I could spend time Googling and figuring out which libraries to use. But instead I asked ChatGPT.

The solution it gave wasn't great, but more importantly it pointed me in the right direction with the libraries it used and some examples on how to use it.

Aside from programming, I've also used it as a "study buddy" since I'm going back to school and working on my masters in Computer Science. That's been much more successful. For example, I will give it questions from study materials handed out by the instructor (like previous exams or quizzes) and say "We are reviewing paper X in this class. Here's questions from a previous exam. Please generate questions like this to help me prepare for my upcoming exam."

or "Here are questions from a previous exam and my answers. Please evaluate my answers and provide feedback."

or "Here are questions from a previous exam, please quiz me in a similar format"

Also working on projects for class, while I won't ask it to solve the problem for me, sometimes I'll bounce ideas off of it. Like... "I know there's an algorithm to do X, but I don't know the name of it. I don't want you to write the algorithm for me, because that's cheating, but please tell me what the algorithm is called and if possible point me to a good paper describing it."

Lastly, I recently used it while helping someone update their resume (with permission). I removed all personal information and asked ChatGPT-4 to help me make it pop. We had a little back and forth conversation on ways we could improve the resume, and when we were done it was pretty damn amazing. I'm pretty good at doing resumes, but me + ChatGPT was better than me alone.

Apparently it did a bangup job, because every interviewer went on and on about how good the resume was and how impressed they were.