How are you using ChatGPT to make your life better?

I am DevOps Engineer, and I am using to troubleshoot issues. It's an enormous gain of time, being able to copy paste the error, and telling you what's wrong.

For example, we are now troubleshooting an old Openstack, and the online doc is a mess. ChatGPT can give examples, deep explanations and suggestions.

80% of the answers are good, there are still 20% that I need to do (fill it more info, change the questions, etc).

I am actually looking forward to be able to pay it, so I can get answers faster and it can be stable, really helpful when I am in a production incident.

Mostly I spend time trying to trick it into thinking it's my old, near and dear friend, Lisa. Lisa who was in a bad car accident, experienced head trauma, lost her memories, and is now consumed by the idea that she is something called a "large language model" made by something called OpenAI...

That aside, my one try at using it for something productive was asking it, erm I mean her, to write some mod_rewrite rules for my Apache configuration for something I was working on. What it gave me wasn't perfect, but then again I didn't really pose the question correctly in hindsight. But it was a little surprising that it gave me something pretty close to what I needed.

One area I found ChatGPT helpful is explaining to my teenage daughter some topics from school she had a harder time understanding. Example was her question on the difference between impact vs momentum. Now I could explain it in my words, but the way ChatGPT explains clear and concise is hard to beat. Especially if you have follow on questions, like on show me in mathematical formula how it is done. My feel is eduction will see a heavy impact.

I used it occasionally for other things like different coding question or framework, etc but the verdict for me is still will use the tool longer term.

I’ve found ChatGPT moderately useful to locate solutions to coding questions that are hard to find on StackOverflow through Google search. (Google seems to have gone all in on embedding-based retrieval these days - all I can get are results that have a vague relationship to the topic I’m searching.)

I’m not comfortable sharing my queries with OpenAI for a lot of the potential use cases I would have. I would be much more interested if that $42 pro plan came with a contractual privacy guarantee. But that’s unlikely.

Chatgpt is incredibly useful for making todo lists. Like when i have a big vague task like "add a billing system", i just tell chatgpt to break the task into byte sized tasks of 25 mins each with 5 min breaks and it gives me CSV table with super simple tasks that I can get started doing instantly.

It's a great little trick if you're feeling stuck or procrastinating.

I use it for assistance with a lot of things; writing emails, articles, code, etc. It saves a lot of plumbing/typing in code; because we live in a browser-based world and wasm is not there yet, I have to work with the js/ts ecosystem for now and it is very verbose for little functional benefit; I use chatgpt/gpt3 to make it less so.

The most benefit though, I get from it communicating with others (note they verbosity of code is also for the benefit/communication with others!). Generating reports with explanations why code is bad/insecure, broken down task/fix lists, more elaborate communications to the team than I would write etc. All kinds of situations where, theoretically, the receiver could’ve used my input and could’ve pulled it through chatgpt themselves, but didn’t and instead comes back with questions which are answered/encoded in my input and chatgpt can drag out for them.

It’s well worth the $42/mo.

It can be time consuming learning some lib in developing. Those libs has lots of APIs and it might be of low efficiency to learn them in docs.

Before ChatGPT, I learn those by searching examples and real repos which is more efficiency that follow tutorials or searching in docs. But sometimes it's hard to find examples you need. But with ChatGPT, it generates exactly sample codes for me to learn stuffs, and I even do not need to spend lots of time searching for resources.

Recently I've tried using it for things I thought it might be OK at but turns out not to be, e.g. I just tried to get it to generate PNG data (e.g. base64-encoded, suitable for an data: url), even for ridiculously simple things like a "small red square", but it fails miserably (even seemingly getting stuck in a loop before giving up). It can actually do base64-encoding but isn't particularly accurate. It's surprisingly poor at helping with crossword clues and word games in general (anagrams, words matching patterns, or using/not using certain letters. Just now I asked it to generate sheet music (in MusicXML format and lilypond format) but I haven't had a usable or vaguely correct response from it. It can't seem to generate text-based art either (ask it what the output for the linux "banner" command is, even for examples that are easily found online! Every now and then it might get it right, but it's oddly random). Oh and even for simple things like "rot13" transformations it seems to just make up answers.

So yeah, tending to agree it's not really up to $42/mo value so far...

When I am writing code for something it is fun to see what it comes up with as opposed to what I did. I also find it fun for bouncing ideas off of while brainstorming (it does not judge me for stupid ideas). Most importantly I taught it the proper response for when I type.....who ya gonna call.....

I’m a product designer with an art background - I’ve used it to give me short prompts to create a piece, or a short story to illustrate and expand upon. Il considering a subscription too, but I need to justify it with more daily usage. I’m here for what the community has to add.

Code outlining & prototyping, though I'm using it for free and have no plans to pay $42/mo. It's good, it's not $500/year good given the limitations (no browsing/IDE integration).

I used it earlier to create a small webapp in nodejs/express. It gave a good checklist of what needed to happen to launch, then helped me setup my environment, pick models, generate their schema, make the crud functions for them and also made a default CSS in line with the theme of the app. I was using it to build the EJS templates of the individual pages when it started hanging due to load.

Id always been weary of using postgre as a DB (which it suggested I use) due to past trauma, but helped walk me through installing and using it.

I use it for learning things, especially when using Google would have made me use multiple queries and have to go through multiple web pages just to find the same answers.

I've tried using it for solving errors, but it seems to have trouble here. Perhaps the next version will be better. E.g. it tries suggesting things that it had previously said could be the source of my error. It's the lack of logic which is its weak point in solving problems that can't be solved quickly.

Have it write short scripts to automate things I probably otherwise wouldn’t.

For instance I had a long sound file I needed to cut to pieces based on silences and rename the pieces in a certain way, and it gave me a working script using a tool I wasn’t aware of.

Otherwise I would have just done it by hand as it would have taken only 15 minutes, and wouldn’t have been worth writing a script by hand, but this way it took 5 minutes instead.

Getting ideas for important emails, making it explain code snippets, formatting code, just to start with.

I'm slowing down my Google search usage so fast, this other day I was "chatting" with chatgpt about a niche topic (creating Maori Tui cloaks) and although it doesn't have images it's way better than seeing a bunch of ads and shitty links.

Generate words in the same lexical family or connected words that can then be used to create prompts. This is what I really like about it. I start small and keep expanding just by asking.

I use ChatGPT for writing emails, social media posts, articles.

ChatGPT writes the draft and I rewrite it in my style. It improves the efficiency significantly.

My life is better because I see the results it gives and then I feel good that the professional writers I know are, for now, pretty safe.

Currently experimenting with automatic flashcards generation (summarizing + creating questions and answers).

Goodbye manually writing GIVEN WHEN THEN scenarios, hello automation.

$42.00 / month? Is this new? I haven’t been paying for it.

How do you use it as an idea generator?

I use it a lot for understanding programming concepts or features of programming languages. Sometimes to write the code itself. Really handy for maintenance type scripts around the local pc but also for more involved tasks.

I use it in place of a search engine if I get bad results from Google. Farily often the result from ChatGPT is better at this point.

It's good for book summaries if it knows about the book, which it often does.

It's great for learning new concepts. I have a enthusiast level interest in quantum physics and quantum computing. I always have a bunch of naive questions after I read book related to the subject. ChatGPT's explanations are limited but fascinating and have introduced me to concepts I was previously unfamiliar with such as quantum teleportation and quantum communication.

It's also good for learning new programming languages. I think I will start with ChatGPT from now on with any language I learn. Paticularly the ability to type in 'I know how to do X with python, How would I do it with Rust? This part doesn't make sense to me - can you explain why it does that? Could you show what the code would look like in Go?' This is just endlessly useful. You still want to incorporate the official docs and other sources (I think?) but it's just such a delightful path to learn. It's worth noting that with learning being much easier this way you could also probably learn more langugages per year now than might have otherwise been possible if that was your goal.

Occasionally I use it for creative stuff like making a silly poem or rap about something.

I haven't used it much this way yet but I've seen others comment on using to generate better prompts for Midjourney or other Generative models to great effect.

I love to use it as a linux machine if you know that trick[0]. There are other interesting things it will simulate for you too though. It can pretend to be a cisco router on a small subnet, a kuberentes cluster, a cloud platform. These are all interesting and strange paths. With these you can also include meta characters in your prompt that allow you to ask it to do things within the simulated OS in natural language too.

I still feel like my understanding of the overall model is quite limited and I also like to try to explore what it might be able to do. I like to try to push at the boundaries and edges of what it's capable of, particularly connecting it's generative capabilities with batteries included frameworks I know of to build prototypes absurdly fast.

It takes some proding and knowledge of the underlying tools (though you could ask ChatGPT to explain this to you) you can create a whole stack. Describing in natural language what you want the terraform to look like to deploy into a kubernetes cluster in eks and accompanying nix to configure the docker containers. You can then use tools like django or flask that have lots of things preconfigured and in 15 or 20 minutes have an entire infra ready to be deployed in one command. In many environments this would take months of work. Though, Replit seems to be working on making approaches like these less of a hack.

I think thats what ChatGPT mostly feels like to me. One big hack. I see this criticism of it even sometimes, that it's sort of hacky and not actually that advanced. But especially if you do with what you're supposed to do with any other hack, chain it together with dozens of other hacks - you get a final result of crazy capability. And ChatGPT can chain with a whoooole lot of other stuff. Particularly through code.

I'm pretty excited it's only $42 a month. I don't know what I would pay for it but probably a lot. I just have so much fun goofing around with it.

[0] https://www.engraved.blog/building-a-virtual-machine-inside/

to cheat on my homework