… reindexed my database (close to 15 million rows) and rewrote a query.
Used to take between 30 seconds and a minute, now takes just under 4 seconds.
It’s a long way off perfect, but damn it’s good!
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I might actually use it some day. Based on what I’ve been reading about it so far, I’d treat it as a wide-reaching “script kiddie”. That is, it may find all sorts of fantastic things, but doesn’t actually understand what it has found, or whether it actually fits my situation. So I’d have to vet every line of code it delivers.
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Yes on all counts. It doesn’t understand your question, nor does it understand its own answer. I wouldn’t trust it to do anything that I don’t already have some knowledge of.
In my world, it’s a handy assistant. I find myself chatting to it like I would to a colleague over skype, often discussing a wireshark trace for SIP (which it “knows” a surprising amount about).
No Utopian solution, but I can’t wait for v4 or 5 …
I’ve found it does great on specific topics where the generally available training material is extensive, and not so great on other topics, or more general questions. When I ask it to write simple Anvil apps, it always creates good looking code that is total nonsense. Smaller functions it does better at.
Anything requiring an artistic sense also results in good looking code that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to.
So far I haven’t tried using it as a second opinion for debugging issues, though, that’s an interesting use.
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It’s also quite good at picking information out and presenting it in a specified form (eg “pick out all the boy names from this list and put them in a csv format along with their ages”)
Nothing I couldn’t do, but very handy when you’re busy. And that was a rather simplistic example 
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I remotely remember of my life without internet, cell phone and chatgpt, 3 things I couldn’t function without today.
I spent a week studying the documentation of 10+ classes in the Autodesk documentation, asking the (paid) support, asking in the forum, writing tons of little tests to understand what classes made sense for my use cases and how they interact with each other. At the end of the week I kind of knew how to use each of them, but still didn’t know the big picture.
Then I had a chat with ChatGPT and I finally understood how everything fits together, what redundant parts are the old way to do the job, what new parts are better for what, etc.
Over the years Autodesk kept adding documentation for the new classes, but nowhere described what’s obsolete, what adds and what replaces. And the forum is full of helpful people that use them that way just because that’s how it has worked for them for a long time. ChatGPT knew the whole picture.
I also use it to write bed time stories in Italian for my 5 year old (I’m Italian, she’s American). You can ask things like “write a story about a mermaid that wants new ballerina shoes for the school dance” and get something disappointing out. Then you can say “add more details about her friends on the beach”, then “explain this or that”, and after 3-4 iterations the story is ready (not for a publisher, but for a 5 year old second language). I finally have an easy way to find stories in Italian here in the US.
I also used it to finally clear some doubts I had about where the background radiation comes from.
I also used it (indirectly) with a friend I’m mentoring with Python and Anvil. I told him what kind of questions he can use ChatGPT for, and his calls have decreased. For example he doesn’t call me any longer when he knows it’s time to use a regular expression, but doesn’t know how.
I also use it to rewrite all my emails. Sometimes I keep my original, sometimes I get its version, sometimes I merge.
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Amazing, when used with care and precision!
Examples:
- Needed a js function to record the actions on the canvas (in an anvil app), save it to a mp4 file and dowload it to the user. ChatGPT created a function that worked with very little revision.
- Needed an overview of different non-linear functions. No problem.
- Generate quizzes for my classes
- A python script to generate synthetic data (hospital visits). Perfect on first try. Even asked it to revise the script to use ICD codes and allow patients to have multiple visits. Worked perfectly!
- More complex things often need to be broken up, and always evaluated critically, but still very valuable. Tried to make it do some computation on the likelihood of the Condorcet paradox under different circumstances. It initially gave probabilities above 1! So it does not have structural constraining knowledge of the type “probabilities cannot be larger than one” and at this point it sometimes does elementary mistakes. I expect this to improve (seems the newer version have better math).
But still. Very, very useful.
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