Feel like we’ve got a lot of tech savvy people here seems like a good place to ask. Basically as a dumb guy that reads the news it seems like everyone that lost their mind (and savings) on crypto just pivoted to AI. In addition to that you’ve got all these people invested in AI companies running around with flashlights under their chins like “bro this is so scary how good we made this thing”. Seems like bullshit.

I’ve seen people generating bits of programming with it which seems useful but idk man. Coming from CNC I don’t think I’d just send it with some chatgpt code. Is it all hype? Is there something actually useful under there?

  • Yes, it is useful. I use ChatGPT heavily for:

    • Brainstorming meal plans for the week given x, y, and z requirements

    • Brainstorming solutions to abstract problems

    • Helping me break down complex tasks into smaller, more achievable tasks.

    • Helping me brainstorm programming solutions. This is a big one, I’m a junior dev and I sometimes encounter problems that aren’t easily google-able. For example, ChatGPT helped me find the python moto library for intercepting and testing the boto AWS calls in my code. It’s also been great for debugging hand-coded JSON and generating boilerplate. I’ve also used it to streamline unit test writing and documentation.

    By far it’s best utility (imo) is quickly filling in broad strokes knowledge gaps as a kind of interactive textbook. I’m using it to accelerate my Rust learning, and it’s great. I have EMT co-workers going to paramedic school that use it to practice their paramedic curriculum. A close second in terms of usefulness is that it’s like the world’s smartest regex, and it’s capable of very quickly parsing large texts or documents and providing useful output.