this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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So this isn't a real example, it's just something I slapped together now as an example of how I generally use ChatGPT 4.0. In a more realistic scenario, I'd be asking more detailed questions, pasting in my existing code, and asking the AI to write smaller sections (maybe 10 lines of code at a time).
A single chat might run for five or six hours, continuously discussing an individual task I'm working on, and I won't just be asking it to write a bunch code. For example in this case I might spend 10 minutes hashing out the exact contents of the 'Activity' record (or, maybe I already did that a month ago, and I might just paste in an example). I'd also be testing the code as I go and writing some of it myself, occasionally asking questions like 'how do I format a date as 4 Feb 2016' in JavaScript?' or 'this line of code fails with X. Why?'
In those five or six hours, I estimate I'm able to get two or three days of work done (at my level of productivity before using this tool... note I've been doing work example like this example for about two decades so I was fairly productive before).
I'm also only pasting the code - ChatGPT also explains the code it outputs, and often those explanations are more useful than the actual code.
This is very comparable to the ROI I would say that I've been seeing for my programming work. I feel like a super hero, or a 22 year old on adderall. I know everything I need to do for any project, but between client meetings, executive meetings, business development, meetings with the product team, mentoring, the actual amount of focused time I get is so little. I can offload a huge amount of the "I know how to do this and I'll know if you do it wrong, but please do this for me" to the machine. This past May I took on a task that would have taken a comparable person, probably 6 months, and I knocked it out in 2.5 weeks. If you already know what you are doing, ChatGPT is steroids.