I sincerely doubt unless you are writing shell all day every day that you will get a decently complex working one liner out faster than GPT4.

Right, but you are bending the argument to your will.

What is a "decently complex one liner"?

If it's decently complex, then it's probably not a one liner, so indeed chatgpt may be faster.

If it's a one liner, then it's probably not complex, so I would be quite confident in being faster than chatgpt.

The reality is, 99.9% of one liners are just series of pipes and filters to extract specific fields from an output, and act on it. I'm quite confident I would be faster than chatgpt for any of these. And no, I don't write bash "all day, every day".

I tend to see "every day bash" as very similar to SQL. Once you know cut, grep, find, sed and awk, even at a basic level, then you can combine them and extract pretty much anything.

One example of what I call “decently complex one liner” that I had ChatGPT write the code for the other day is a command to find top n files of a given pattern in a certain directory, sorted by n in terms of most recently modified. Sure that is reasonably fast to write yourself if you know shell pretty well but why bother when I can just input my requirements and get something that immediately works without squinting at man pages and checking my patterns on regex101? In the time it takes to write out that two sectioned pipe command I’ve already solved it by pasting my requirements into the AI.

SQL is a great example too where I will use an AI even though it’s not necessary. I’ve probably written many tens or hundred thousands of lines of SQL in my life and I would still prefer to just toss my requirements into an AI and have it write the query for me so I don’t have to cross reference things and look up syntax. Easier to do that and iterate on it once or twice than comb through some bigquery or Postgres docs because I can’t remember that particular flavor of sql today