One coder's uneasy relationship with ChatGPT is another's productivity booster

James Somers has an excellent article in The New Yorker about ChatGPT changing his relationship with programming computers: "When I first used GPT-4, I could see what Dijkstra was talking about. You can't just say to the A.I., "Solve my problem." That day may come, but for now it is more like an instrument you must learn to play. You have to specify what you want carefully, as though talking to a beginner. In the search-highlighting problem, I found myself asking GPT-4 to do too much at once, watching it fail, and then starting over. Each time, my prompts became less ambitious. By the end of the conversation, I wasn't talking about search or highlighting; I had broken the problem into specific, abstract, unambiguous sub-problems that, together, would give me what I wanted". The referral system for The Sizzle I told you about today - I built it in a weekend using ChatGPT that same way. I've also used ChatGPT to make me various shell scripts. Well worth the $30/m OpenAI ask for it.