100% agree with this. I used ChatGPT earlier today to give me networkx code for computing the connected components of a graph and visualizing the graph. This isn't hard to do, but I don't use networkx all that often and I forget the exact API. I could go to read documentation and piece together an example myself, or I could ask ChatGPT for an example, which tends to be much faster than doing the former.
Re:Burnout because of ChatGPT?
by skepticATX on Tuesday August 15, 2023 @09:41AM
(#37133897)
I Googled "applescript loop through apple notes" and this was the first result: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/225938/notes-scrip.... Looks exactly like what ChatGPT came up with for you minus the dialog.
I then Googled "applescript print to console" and got this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13653358/how-to-log-obje... ; admittedly this answer took a few minutes to read through, but the second most upvoted answer recommended using log, which your ChatGPT-developed solution (eventually) used.
This all took me < 5 minutes.
Yeah, those StackOverflow posts are the perfect illustration of why I find ChatGPT so much useful for this kind of thing.
Compare them to my original transcript. They don't provide me with enough information: how do I actually run that code?
I got ChatGPT to split me out a zsh script, which caused it to show me how to use "osascript -e ".
But... they're things that require research. Do you know how to loop through all of your Apple Notes using AppleScript off the top of your head?
That research isn't free: it takes time.
As someone who hasn't done much work with AppleScript before, I would guess it would take me about half an hour to figure out how to do this. But there's a risk that it might take longer.
So the sensible thing is probably not to take on that project at all! I don't care enough about solving it to invest the research time.
But the time taken to chuck a prompt through GPT-4 and then test the results to see if it works is less than a minute.
I wrote more about how this is encouraging me to be more ambitious with my projects here: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/27/ai-enhanced-developmen...