I was finally playing around with it for some coding stuff. At first, I was playing around with building the starts of a chess engine, and it did ok for a quick and dirty implementation. It was cool that it could create a zip file with the project files that it was generating, but it couldn't populate it with some of the earlier prompts. Overall, it didn't seem that worthwhile for me (as an experienced software engineer who doesn't have issues starting projects).

I then uploaded a file from a chess engine that I had already implemented and asked for a code review, and that went better. It identified two minor bugs and was able to explain what the code did. It was also able to generate some other code to make use of this class. When I asked if there were some existing projects that I could have referenced instead of writing this myself, it pointed out a couple others and explained the ways they differed. For code review, it seemed like a useful tool.

I then asked it for help with a math problem that I had been working on related to a different project. It came up with a way to solve it using dynamic programming, and then I asked it to work through a few examples. At one point, it returned numbers that were far too large, so I asked about how many cases were excluded by the rules. In the response, it showed a realization that something was incorrect, so it gave a new version of the code that corrected the issue. For this one, it was interesting to see it correct its mistake, but it ultimately still relied on me catching it.

I use ChatGPT mainly for recipes, because I'm bad at that. And it works great, I can tell it "I have this and this and this in my fridge and that and that in my pantry, what can I make?" and it will give me a recipe that I never would have come up with. And it's always been good stuff.

And I do learn from it. People say you can't learn from using AI, but I've gotten better at cooking thanks to ChatGPT. Just a while ago I learned about deglazing.

Using AI is helpful, but by no means does it replace your brain. Sure, it can write emails and really helps with code, but anything beyond basic troubleshooting and "short" code streams, it's an assistant, not an answer.

I use it somewhat regularly to send snarky emails to coworkers in a professional, buzzword overload responses to mundane inquiries.

I use it every so often to help craft a professional go fuck yourself email too.