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It's good for simple things, but nothing else. If you gave someone ChatGPT who never did programming before, that person would be stuck in a limbo for 10 hours

It's good for simple things, but nothing else. If you gave someone ChatGPT who never did programming before, that person would be stuck in a limbo for 10 hours trying to get a simple program to work because that's how the model is. In many ways it is a glorified copy/paste machine that's faster (in some cases) than using traditional search. And for bigger projects you're going to get obliterated because at some point the model will either forget the conversation or it will start giving you some random suggestions, all of which lead to frustration and lost time. But for small projects and snippets, I definitely use it a lot. JavaScript functions, CSS boilerplates and stuff like that - even if it's 50 lines long, I can just do some other stuff while it generates the basic outline and I am on my way.

mindcrime 4y ago
In many ways it is a glorified copy/paste machine that's faster (in some cases) than using traditional search. That sounds like the most apt description I've heard yet. I have a feeling that's pretty close to spot on. I don't think ChatGPT is going to do much that's very creative or elegant in and of itself, but it can find and c&p a useful snippet for you very quickly. Maybe the biggest advantage of this over traditional c&p though, is that it does have at least some memory and ability to revise the generated code in a "conversational" fashion. IME (which to be fair is limited, see my other comment) that actually does work, at least to a point.