I use it because it's 10-100x more interesting, fun, and fast as a way to program, instead of me having to personally hand-craft hundreds of lines of boilerplate API interaction code every time I want to get something done.

Besides, it's not like it puts out great code (or even always working code), so I still have to read everything and debug it. And sometimes it writes code that is just fine and fit for purpose and horrendously ugly, so I still have to scrap everything and do it myself.

(And then sometimes I spend 10x as long doing that, because it turns out it's also just plain good fun to grow an aesthetic corner of the code just for the hell of it, too — as long as I don't have to.)

And even after all that extra time is factored back in: it's still way faster and more fun than the before-times. I'm actually enjoying building things again.

Pair-programming with ChatGPT is like having an idiot-savant friend who always surprises you. Doesn’t matter if the code is horrible, amazing, or something inbetween. It’s always interesting.

And I agree it’s fun. Maybe it’s the simulated social interaction without consequences. I can be completely honest with my robot friend about the shitty or awesome code and no one’s feelings are going to get hurt. ChatGPT will just keep trying to be helpful.

People aren’t using ChatGPT because they can’t do it themselves, they’re using it to save time.

You can be an experienced developers with years building complex applications behind you and still find ChatGPT useful. I've found it useful for documenting individual methods or simply explaining my own/other's code or writing unit test methods or just using it to add boilerplate stuff that saves me an hour that I use elsewhere.

I think many people find ChatGPT useful specifically because they have years of experience building complex applications.

If you know exactly what you want to ask of it, and have the ability to evaluate and verify what it produces, it's incredible what you can get out of it. Sure it's nothing I couldn't have done otherwise... eventually. The productivity it enables is worth every cent.

Easily the best $20 I've spent in ages, they should have run with the initial idea of charging $42.

But holy moly anyone putting confidential information into it needs to stop

I’ve been doing this kind of thing pretty regularly for the past few weeks, even though I know how to do any of the tasks in question. It’s usually still faster, even when taking the time to anonymize the details; and I don’t paste anything I wouldn’t put on a public gist (lots of “foo, bar”, etc)

Precisely because I can abstract it is why I use ChatGPT. It can do the boring, tedious, repetitive stuff instead of me and has shown me the joy of using programming to solve ACTUAL problems yet again, instead of having to spend hours on unimportant problems like "how do I do X with library Y".