this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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I would hate to see your code if you think ChatGPT’s code works great. I’m guessing you’ve never asked it do anything complex.
So this isn't a real example, it's just something I slapped together now as an example of how I generally use ChatGPT 4.0. In a more realistic scenario, I'd be asking more detailed questions, pasting in my existing code, and asking the AI to write smaller sections (maybe 10 lines of code at a time).
A single chat might run for five or six hours, continuously discussing an individual task I'm working on, and I won't just be asking it to write a bunch code. For example in this case I might spend 10 minutes hashing out the exact contents of the 'Activity' record (or, maybe I already did that a month ago, and I might just paste in an example). I'd also be testing the code as I go and writing some of it myself, occasionally asking questions like 'how do I format a date as 4 Feb 2016' in JavaScript?' or 'this line of code fails with X. Why?'
In those five or six hours, I estimate I'm able to get two or three days of work done (at my level of productivity before I started paying $20/month for ChatGPT+).
I'm also only pasting the code - ChatGPT also explains the code it outputs, and often those explanations are more useful than the actual code.
This is very comparable to the ROI I would say that I've been seeing for my programming work. I feel like a super hero, or a 22 year old on adderall. I know everything I need to do for any project, but between client meetings, executive meetings, business development, meetings with the product team, mentoring, the actual amount of focused time I get is so little. I can offload a huge amount of the "I know how to do this and I'll know if you do it wrong, but please do this for me" to the machine. This past May I took on a task that would have taken a comparable person, probably 6 months, and I knocked it out in 2.5 weeks. If you already know what you are doing, ChatGPT is steroids.
Its like anything else, in that if you aren't getting good results working with ChatGPT, you simply might not be informed enough to ask the right questions. If you don't know what the right question is to ask, or how to form it, you'll get poor results. I've been working in my field long enough to know where almost all of the bodies are buried, so I don't fall into the kinds of traps that novices do when they really don't understand what they are doing (although its not always obvious to them that they don't).
This. It's taken me a while to learn how to use it effectively. I'm still learning, but I get much better results than I used to.