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I don't really think it's the effort, to be honest. A short while ago, I made a Custom GPT for my wife[0] that she thoroughly enjoyed and uses all the time. It

by arjie 9mo ago

I don't really think it's the effort, to be honest. A short while ago, I made a Custom GPT for my wife[0] that she thoroughly enjoyed and uses all the time. It didn't take me that long. The value in the thing is that I could see what she wanted and make it like she wanted. And on the receiving side, a friend of ours knitted our daughter, Astra, a quilt with her name on it and with this lovely star motif. It must have taken her and her mother, a seamstress, ages. But if she had done it instantaneously, I think I still would have loved it. As for the other side of things, there is one thing that gives me a mild twinge of envy: I grew up on the command-line and when I write on it, I can knock out a full bash pipeline literally at the command-line super-fast. Many of my friends are far better engineers, but this one thing makes me great at any sort of debugging and all that. Now everyone has that! I'm USELESS. Well, not really, but it's funny that this unique skill is meaningless. Overall, I've found that AI stuff has let me do more and more things. Instead of thinking, at the end of the week, "Oh man, I wish I'd made progress on my side project" I think "Damn, that wasn't such a good idea after all" which is honestly far more satisfying! 0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-10-17/Custom_GPTs https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-10-17/Custom_GPTs

munificent 9mo ago
I'm glad you brought this up. I considered going into this direction but decided not to. You're right that we can sometimes to very meaningful things for others that are easy for us. A couple of years ago, I broke my ankle. While I was trying to figure out what surgery was best, I had a conversation with my cousin's husband to who happens to be an orthopedic surgeon. That conversation took nothing but twenty minutes of his time, but was very helpful and meaningful to me. However, the reason he was able to have that easy conversation is because of all of time he already spent training to become an ortho. Likewise, in your case, you were able to easily set up a custom GPT because of the experience you already have in software engineering. The effort is still there, it's just sort of amortized out over time.

by arjie 9mo ago

munificent 9mo ago

I'm glad you brought this up. I considered going into this direction but decided not to. You're right that we can sometimes to very meaningful things for others that are easy for us. A couple of years ago, I broke my ankle. While I was trying to figure out what surgery was best, I had a conversation with my cousin's husband to who happens to be an orthopedic surgeon. That conversation took nothing but twenty minutes of his time, but was very helpful and meaningful to me. However, the reason he was able to have that easy conversation is because of all of time he already spent training to become an ortho. Likewise, in your case, you were able to easily set up a custom GPT because of the experience you already have in software engineering. The effort is still there, it's just sort of amortized out over time.