I should clarify. I'm gradually learning to make it more useful but the time/effort input so far could have easily been put towards getting more work done than I've gotten out of it. I'm okay with that; I do think it will pay off as I figure out what it can do well for me that I'm not great at. I'm constantly thinking of simple tools I could build with it that could genuinely save me (and others) time.

One cool thing is feeding it software documentation and telling it to generate boilerplate for something you need. Like, say React is brand new and post-GPT-learning-era, and the 'getting started' docs don't suit your use case well – you could ask it to make something aligned with what you're shooting for. Assuming it's close to correct, this can be a useful jumpstart.

It actually does an okay job. It really is all about the prompts. Good, concise documentation can yield great results. I find this nice for getting me over the hump of deciding if I care about some software, if it'll suit my needs, etc. It's also a nice little boost in general, simply to avoid manually generating boilerplate. There are so many things to learn and get started with all the time. GPT is like a little gopher to help you navigate the boring parts of libraries or frameworks you're not as enthusiastic about.

I didn't mean to imply GPT is some sort of amateur time-sink of a project. It's impressive and absolutely useful in some ways, and I'm sure I'll discover more ways all the time. At the moment the ~$20 just feels like it might be a generous amount for what I'm getting.

Edit: I guess if I learn to use AI well and it becomes a tool I reach for frequently, the $20 is well invested. In the more immediate sense though, it feels lower value. Hopefully that makes sense.