>>you end up earning more, or working way less.

Or you're just treading water.

Not everyone gains some super power productivity or an excess of free time when utilizing tools...

Some people just being able to actually scrape by BECAUSE of said tools.

Indeed. People in developing countries might learn what the public school system should have taught them, with a free private tutor that is ChatGPT or similar.

ChatGPT can't even reliably tell how many times a letter is in a word. I doubt it will be a reliable tutor

The ability to tell letter occurrence in a word is not a good measure for the quality of a large language model.

Anecdotally, it's less reliable when it comes to verifiable fact; but highly useful for brainstorming and sussing out creative solution.

Your results may vary.

The public school system in my country still teaches that the tongue has areas sensitive to specific tastes.

If a tutor tried to teach how to count letters instead of a useful skill I'd fire them.

Natural language is ambiguous and ChatGPT can handle that pretty well, if you want to count letters use Python or something.

That, and the thousands of numbskulls who waste their time trying to get ChatGPT to do math problems that a $1 calculator (or worst case, free Google Sheets) could do, is the most pointless waste of computing power, and I say this as someone who remembers Flash ads.

If you really are staring at strings and wanting those letters counted, you can easily ask it to write you a Python, JS, Ruby program that will do so, and in my experience for a task like that it will NAIL that task perfectly 100% of the time, and can even explain how it works to boot!

When I tested it on subjects I knew, it gave better answers than teachers in my high school (Poland, but I guess it might be similar elsewhere in the West)

Also, a friend physicist tested ChatGPT on the basics of quantum physics and he was surprised at how much it knew.

IMHO the chat is at a level of 1st year university student - of any subject available. The only issue being that it always sounds super confident, even if it's wrong.

For me, ChatGPT also has a psychological benefit. It makes me feel like there’s someone that I can fall back on when I‘m stuck. It might be wrong (often the bot is not super helpful), but this is not about rationality.

You should probably not be thinking about it in that way.

Anthropomorphising statistical models is a bad idea...

We are anthropomorphizing NPCs in video games for decades - it's ok.

Oh I‘m not antropomorphising. It feels more like a GPS - a tool I wouldn’t like to be without when driving unknown places.

I work mostly alone on projects, at least currently. While I have friends I can bounce back general ideas on, it‘s hard to get good feedback on a small problem that I‘d be stuck with for, let’s say, 5 minutes.

So far, the choice has been between disrupting others‘ flow (who might not even work with the tech I‘m using), or exploring the issue myself. Problem solving is certainly not a skill I want to atrophy, but figuring out framework specific intricacies is more a chore than an interesting problem. A chore I can get stuck on. And that’s where the bot often points me in the right direction.

An example: I‘m dabbling in the PETAL stack with a side project, and Ecto‘s DSL still feels foreign to me. ChatGPT is actually really good at fixing my Ecto queries and recently made the suggestion to use the „dynamic“ function. It applied the function in a slightly wrong way, but that made me read up dynamic query building, which is already bearing fruit.

I could have read all of Ecto‘s documentation and wouldn’t need the bot, but that’s out of scope right now. I‘m currently working with native iOS, Android, JS/TS (Next), Flutter, and Elixir - if I read all the documentation, I wouldn’t write any code.

You meant "something to fall back on" instead of "someone". If you write it like that suddenly you're not anthropomorphizing anymore =)

I agree, I noticed this too late. Apologies to GP

Yeah, they hate it.

I'm finding ChatGPT may be wrong, but it's answers are often enough to point me in the right direction - particularly when I'm working in a new domain where I'm not yet experienced enough to be able to ask google the right questions.

Previously I'd fall back to asking in a forum and getting a (tbf) much better answer a few hours or days later, but ChatGPT may be enough to point me in the right direction in a few minutes

Well put, it’s really similar for me.

I had this happen then I was stuck on a small side project that was slightly out of my wheelhouse.

It wasn’t meaningful enough to spend a lot of time researching or to pay someone to solve it so I was just going to give up on it.

Asked ChatGPT and it was able to unblock me by pointing me in the right direction.

Now I have a working tool to solve a very specific problem of mine.

If I'm at work and stuck on a problem I can hardly afford to wait around for a few days to be unblocked by a lucky forum answer.

Tools are an investment.

Entertainment is an expense.

Sure, there's wiggle room in each but in a nutshell, that's the framework.

> you end up earning more, or working way less.

Unless you are salaried?

Still might be worth it. My strategy for getting "raises" always was:

1. increase productivity 2. ask for a raise 3. profit or change company

and it worked pretty good last 7 years. Certain investments in tools definitely helped with that.

> especially when you're a freelancer

I think that's the big qualifier here. The productivity paying off the price is only meaningful if your time and money are arbitrarily fungible for each other, and for most people they are not. There's a good chance they won't be able to find a way to convert that saved time into the corresponding $20+ needed to pay the bill. And if finances are tight, $20/month might be a deal breaker.

Even if you're a freelancer, if your projects have billing caps related to the number of hours you expect to work then you don't necessarily have adequate time/money fungibility. $20 a month also might not be worth the cost of going out and acquiring a new project.

But for anyone in IT or related fields? $20/month feels like a nobrainer if you're in the West.

It's like paying for Jetbrains IDEs. I'm a bumbling idiot writing Symfony and Wordpress code and PHPStorm is 150 Euros a year. It probably increases my productivity by that much per day.

If ChatGPT saves you more than 60 seconds a day, or makes you work more comfortable, it's easily worth $20.

> $20/month feels like a nobrainer if you're in the West.

I earn 2000€ per month as a C# dev in France, (assuming $1 == 1€) I just need a hundred subscriptions like that to have no money left at the end of the month. While I'll admit a 100 subs is a bit much, it's very easy to have 10 or 15.

> If ChatGPT saves you more than 60 seconds a day

Even if it saved me 4 hours a day I wouldn't be paid more.

You're not part of the target market, then. Think of it like any other recurring service, e.g., pickup/drop off laundry. It costs way more than doing laundry at the neighborhood laundromat and doesn't save very much time, maybe a couple hours a week. But, if you don't enjoy doing laundry, and you don't have an in-unit washer dryer, it may be worth it.

If you really don't like using your brain to write, then why not spend a bit of money to offload some thinking to this service?

My point was that I'm not a rarity, not everybody makes 100k+ a year even in the "West", there are a lot of people like me that have to watch carefully what they spend.

If ChatGPT saved you 4 hours a day, you could be less stressed and have more time to do other stuff like exercise

No I would still have to sit at work waiting for the clock to be at the right time to be allowed to leave.

A motivated developer in Western Europe can certainly earn more than that, either in permanent or even more as a contractor. In which case the cost can even be expensed.

If that's not your goal that's perfectly fine, but it's a very reasonable cost for anyone driven to be more effective and earn more.

You're severely underpaid, juniors with 1 year experience can get more in Poland after tax.

I have 14 years experience, same job. But as I said in another comment I have aging parents that I have to take care of and I live in a small town without opportunities.

I had found a high paying job in Switzerland that was close enough but it was canceled due to Covid.

Well, I'm talking about remote jobs which are absolutely prevalent here, so where you live does not matter.

If it saved you 4hrs/day you could serve more clients if you we’re working as freelancer and therefor more than offset the cost.

If you’re an employee then use that additional 4hrs to focus on other things.

2000€ per month? In France? That's slightly less than software devs earn in Poland, with way lower living costs!

Is this a norm in your country? Which part of France do you live in, if you don't mind me asking?

I live in Belfort in eastern France near the Swiss and German border. It's a small town, there's not many opportunities here but I have aging parents I have to take care of so I can't move.

And you decided to not work remotely and 10x your income instantly, because you'd miss your office and colleagues. Got it!

> But for anyone in IT or related fields? $20/month feels like a nobrainer if you're in the West.

Yes, I definitely hear you. If you're living well within your means then sure. But on the other hand, a shocking number of Americans don't live within their means and are strapped with credit card debt. In those situations even a small number of instances of this kind of "oh, it's just $20 / month" reasoning start to add up.

> It probably increases my productivity by that much per day.

Again, this doesn't matter if you're on the edge of cash flow positivity and can't actually turn that productivity into dollars. Your employer isn't going to pay you $20 / month more because they can't measure your productivity with that much granularity.

I see what you mean, but I wouldn't compare $20 for work to e.g. $20 for Netflix Pro Gold Premium; it's business vs entertainment.

You're probably right that it's a medium-term game for employees (if their employer isn't ready to pay the $20, which I assume they would be), but you will certainly be more productive and get things done quicker than others (and probably measurably so), which should give you a good spot for a promotion or negotiations. But of course, that only really works if you derive value from ChatGPT. If it's more of a "my work is easier but not faster or better", then it won't make sense.

Everything is relative. I'm in IT - in fact in a decently high paying and relevant part of it, being a devops specialist - in the West (in Italy) and I make ~1700 euros a month, and this is with 10 years of experience in the sector. I'm not getting ripped off, this is by far the highest salary I've had and I make about as much as my parents do after working for 45 years.

I still cannot afford, after house, car and living expenses, to spend 20 euros a month for an AI chat app, or 150 a year for an IDE.

For reference, I do most of my work in standard vscode with almost no plugins and/or emacs, depending on what I'm doing, on the company provided dell/windows laptop. The only subscriptions, personal or work, that I pay for are netflix, spotify, xbox game pass, nintendo online and amazon prime - and we're thinking of dropping netflix and spotify lately since they're increasing prices and lowering in value.

> I'm not getting ripped off, this is by far the highest salary I've had and I make about as much as my parents do after working for 45 years.

You're absolutely getting ripped off if this a real devops specialist role (some companies use that word for manual server admins) and your employment history is not an indicator of anything. Only the market is and where are you in the salary range for a given role.

I'm an average dev from Poland (basically 1/4 GDP of Italy), working for a Polish, not international company (clients are international), having less than 10 years of documented commercial experience and I'm making about 5k EUR after taxes (converted from PLN) and I'm not even close to the cap.

At my first company I made about 500 EUR a month, and whilst the second paid me twice as much, it was still absolutely ripping me off.

You’re making 2.5x the UK average salary. That’s not what happens to an average dev in an average role here; are you a consultant or doing 100 hour weeks or have expertise in some specialist field?

The general average salary is low everywhere as most jobs don't require any kind of "higher" education, so of course devs earn more. I'm earning 4-5x of Poland's average but that's meaningless. I sure as heck don't earn more than an average UK dev, because I've worked with some of them and I know their rates.

I'm just a full-stack .NET + React developer working in a mid-sized city as a contractor (but that's complicated, because in Poland most companies basically evade taxes by hiring via contracts with the same benefits and responsibilities as regular employees). I work up to 40hrs a week just like a normal employee.

Just take a look at one of the many job boards and search for "devops" or my role which is ".net full-stack": https://nofluffjobs.com/pl

Most oscillate around 20k PLN gross, which is definitely a lot more than 1700 EUR. Some rates given by devs in this thread are shocking and something isn't right.

So you making only 1700 euros a month? Sorry I think you are getting ripped off, as a programmer in Poland/Warsaw you would make around 5k+ euros per month. Change you work you are worth much more.

edit: This is funny just after i wrote this I've seen so many references to Poland in this thread. But yeah it's interesting as working in UK as developer in small company I was earning 2500 pounds after taxes (Liverpool). And I thought that it's a dream job back then. But it was 10 years ago. And I think I am rather average developer just on level III on 6 level scale. So right now living in Poland my wage expectation is around 6k euro as Backend Java developer.