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.