ChatGPT continues to impress. I’ve started asking it programming questions just to save a few minutes here or there. For example, this question returned a detailed answer that was exactly correct:
I’m using Ruby and DataMapper with MySQL. How to get a list of unique years used in a database table “pages” with date field “posted_at”?
🤯
@manton I’ve used it to quickly write a haversine formula for calculating the distance between two lat/lng points. What it did in 5 seconds would have taken me much longer!
It’s also a BEAST at regex. I will never again try to do those mental gymnastics.
@manton Same. It is incredible what these things can do. I also have to say that I over estimated how difficult it would be to verify that the code works. (I maybe wouldn’t say that if my code would handle more crucial parts of a business, where you simply cannot get it wrong).
@manton yep, saving time from slogging through tasks that have been solved many times over is it’s strong suit.
For more obscure tasks it can help with “how do I even go about this” but the answers turn out to be more signposts and arrows than gps turn-by-turn.
It seems to ~95% understand what you mean even when it can only produce 50% correct output, which is pretty amazing in itself.
