Coding assistance. "JavaScript function to use fetch() to run a HEAD request against a URL and return the headers" - I use little prompts like that dozens of times a day.
Lots of dumb little calculations, effectively using ChatGPT Code Interpreter mode as a calculator. I like being able to review the code it wrote - it ends up being a bit faster than me running the calculations myself in a Python notebook.
OCR. I paste screenshots directly into ChatGPT and ask it to extract text from them - great for things like producing alt= text.
Brainstorming. "Twenty ideas for a Datasette plugin to help with investigative data journalism", that kind of thing.
I use ChatGPT Voice mode when I'm walking my dog, which means I can have an hour long brainstorming conversation, effectively a rubber duck that can talk back to me - except my weird audio AI assistant can also look things up on the web for me and even write and execute test code without me even having to take my phone out of my pocket.
I'm a terrible amateur programmer. ChatGPT has let me be much, much more productive. I no longer waste tons of time on simple errors that are hard to spot, such as badly written if statements, typos in variable names, etc. It can usually spot these things much more quickly than I can. Similarly, it greatly speeds up figuring out things like deployment and build issues, though it's certainly not perfect in that regard.
For example, yesterday, composer wasn't happy with some dependencies, which now require PHP 8.1. Upgrading the server to PHP8.1 broke everything -- so I have to figure out how to deal with the broken dependencies or updating the php version without breaking everything, or both. ChatGPT often can give me a quick answer to this type of thing. Though, it sometimes can't either, which leaves me about where I'd have been anyways.
same here! im more of a wannabe programmer "script kiddie". got into it through doing basic autohotkey stuff years ago and have been getting into python the last few years. i chanced my arm last night and asked bing chat to make me a python script that would take dynalist's exported OPML and convert it to workflowy's OPML format and it managed it on the first go! that seems crazy to me. i spent the next few hours reworking the code and ironing out a few edge cases, but it probably would have taken me a good few evenings if i had tried to do the whole thing by myself.
ive been asking it a ton of questions about raspberry pi stuff, how to make browser extensions, various API stuff for messing around with spotify and youtube and lots of other things ive wanted to get into for a while but that i had been putting off because i didnt know where to start. a lot of it is seeming very do-able now all of a sudden
- DevOps/sysadmin assistance (eg. "how do I do $action with $thing (eg. Ansible)")
- Improve writing/correct spelling (via AI actions in Raycast. Select text, launch action). Here I try to willfully inspect its improvements so I can get better at communicating without the aid of AI. Also sometimes AI is wrong.
- Write email polite rejections (again via AI actions in Raycast. Select text of email wanting something, launch action, AI writes a polite rejection, I click send.)
- Summarize emails/articles/essays/etc.
I'd survive without it, of course, but it really helps speed things up every day.
Running Python micro-benchmarks to answer questions about which approach is faster, often involving SQLite. I wrote about that here: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/12/code-interpreter/
Lots of dumb little calculations, effectively using ChatGPT Code Interpreter mode as a calculator. I like being able to review the code it wrote - it ends up being a bit faster than me running the calculations myself in a Python notebook.
OCR. I paste screenshots directly into ChatGPT and ask it to extract text from them - great for things like producing alt= text.
Brainstorming. "Twenty ideas for a Datasette plugin to help with investigative data journalism", that kind of thing.
Naming things - another form of brainstorming. See https://til.simonwillison.net/gpt3/picking-python-project-na...
I use ChatGPT Voice mode when I'm walking my dog, which means I can have an hour long brainstorming conversation, effectively a rubber duck that can talk back to me - except my weird audio AI assistant can also look things up on the web for me and even write and execute test code without me even having to take my phone out of my pocket.