I think that we are the silent majority. ChatGPT can be mildly useful for me as a dev, but in general it actually slows me down. There have been a few times when it has really shined, but it’s not the norm.
If it was actually a life altering tool (and it might be one day) there wouldn’t need to be an entire industry of people trying to convince everyone that with just one small trick Google doesn’t want you to know, you can quadruple your productivity.
It’s immensely helpful for learning. Orders of magnitude better than google which has ruined their search results with seo bait.
At the very least, its a much more powerful google (dont nitpick my comparison, i realize it hallucinates). Getting the EXACT context of your question is something generalized search/articles online will NEVER give you, and you can read hundreds of pages of docs all day. This is good for certain things, but not when you want to know just a single setting or atomic piece of information. I want to get the smallest amount of accurate information very specifically to my problem, as I'm programming many hours per day on my own companies as a one man show.
My search history on chat gpt includes a few things as examples:
- specific ways SOLID principles could be applied to Go which is non-OOP language
- helping me quickly learn nuances of Lua for configuring neovim, specifically for weird syntax or things annoying to google (ie what does # mean) or what does a specific error mean within the context of the configuration
- more efficient top k algorithms than what I was building for learning purposes
- asking to break down big o complexity of certain types of sort functions and whether they differ from n log n
- helping me learn enough rust to do a bug fix Pr that was annoying me
- x vs s in neovim config for keymap modes
- figuring out why Ruby doesn’t implement descending ranges
Google hasn't ruined search results instead the services like chatGPT are generating so much spam and crap that Google search can't really keep up. So the service you are using itself is making google and internet worse, and eventually that would turn chatgpt bad as well. Its a vicious cycle.
Google has MOST definitely destroyed their search results. They did this long before ChatGPT.
This is repeated on like a daily basis anywhere online, and lots of people agree. All you will see are basically fake amazon review websites, or affiliate links in everything. The top 100 pages are pure garbage that they choose to favor over actual websites with real reputation.
If it was actually a life altering tool (and it might be one day) there wouldn’t need to be an entire industry of people trying to convince everyone that with just one small trick Google doesn’t want you to know, you can quadruple your productivity.