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I've actually started asking people when they comment that it has been an amazing life-changing thing, how did it improve things.

90% of the time was people who are code adjacent that don't often write "code" who then use Copilot to write a one off script.

They have no idea the size of the chasm between a one off script and writing production code.




As someone who finds ChatGPT life changing and amazing, here's what you're missing:

1. I'm a strong software engineer, but there are a lot of places where I have a conceptual understanding, and can describe the properties of a correct solution, but I don't know the "jargon" of libraries. ChatGPT lets me describe the properties of the solution declaratively and it can write the library code that implements that behavior for commonly used libraries.

2. My specialty is machine learning/AI, so there are things like Devops where I have an understanding of docker/terraform/etc and can use them but I don't know the best way to utilize those to take full advantage of them. ChatGPT can tell me about devops best practices and how to use the tools/structure the configs to avoid a lot of footguns. This also applies to areas like front-end, where you can ask about front end best practices given a particular project's properties, and it can even update existing code to implement the things it tells you about.

3. ChatGPT is great at writing boring code like tests, documentation, etc. Not writing that code makes coding much more engaging in general.


I have also noticed that the biggest proponents in my organisation are those that don’t code or code very little!

Personally, as I have used the product more I have found it more useful especially with boilerplate type of code - especially unit tests.




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