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chatgpt has been really good for teaching me code. As long as I write the code myself and just ask for clarity or best practices i haven't had any bad hallucinations.

For example I wanted to change a character in an array with another one but it would give some error about data types that were way out of my league. Anyways apparently I needed to run list(string) first even though string[5] will return the character.

However that's in python which I assume is well understood due to the ton of stackoverflow questions and alternative docs. I did ask it to do something in Google docs scripting something once and it had no idea what was going on and just hoped it worked. Fair enough, I also had no idea what was going on.

Gippity is pretty good at getting me 90% of the way there.

It usually sets me up with at least all the terms and etc I now know to google, whereas before I wouldnt even know what I am looking for in the first place.

Also not gonna lie, search engines are even worse than gippity for accuracy often.

And Ive had to fight with so many cases of garbage documentation lately that gippity genuinely does the job better, because it has all the random comments from issues and solutions in its data.

Usually once I have my sort of key terms I need to dig into, I can use youtube/google and get more specific information though, and thats the last 10%

You have to understand it well enough to know what stuff you can rely on. On the other hand nowadays there are often sources there, so it's easy to check.

bold of u to assume there are docs

I usually tell it "using only information found on applicationwebsite.com " that works pretty well at least to get me in the ballpark to find the answer I'm looking for.

All tools get misused.

In another thread, I was curious about the probability of reaching the age of 60 while living in the US.

Google gave me an assortment of links to people asking similar questions on Quora, and to some generic actuarial data, and to some totally unrelated bullshit.

ChatGPT gave me a multi-paragraph response referencing its data sources and providing both a general life expectancy and a specific answer broken out by gender. I asked ChatGPT how it reached this answer, and it proceeded to show its work. If I wanted to verify the work myself, ChatGPT gave me source material to cross-check and the calculations it used to find the answer. Google didn't even come close to answering the question, much less producing the data it used to reach the answer.

I'm as big an AI skeptic as anyone, but it can't be denied that generic search engines have degraded significantly. I feel like I'm using Alta Vista in the 90s whenever I query Google in the modern day. The AI systems do a marginally better job than old search engines were doing five years ago, before enshittification hit with full force.

It sucks that AI is better, but it IS better.

Because realistically, that time is zero.

Eh I just let it write my bash scripts. A bit of trial and error with ChatGPT beats having to read the ffmpeg or imagemagick docs.