ChatGPT is the most powerful tool I’ve used in my career. It’s incredible. I feel so lucky to be living in a world where my work is supercharged by machines that think. I use it for most of my daily work, especially programming. I hate to admit it, but as a lazy programmer, I often use ChatGPT to bootstrap projects, functions, components etc. Examples:
I then find myself going back and forth with ChatGPT as I start building on those foundations. It’s taken a while, but I’ve realized that I’m not a fan of this mode of interaction because it leads me to actively becoming more dumb: copying and pasting blobs of code is not good for my brain (sounds obvious, but I didn’t see it this way for a while). It’s so tempting to do because those blobs look 90% correct, but there are so many reasons as to why this is a terrible idea.
After using some other tools, I noticed that this feeling is not universal. Some tools truly feel like a copilot for my work, and I think that is due to the fact that they are deeply integrated in whatever tool I’m doing work in, or they are the tool and keep me in the driver’s seat. Examples:
With all the above said, there are also some AI tools that I find myself not using - Notion AI is a good example. I find myself pretty consistently going back to ChatGPT when I’m writing Notion docs. I think it’s something to do with the UX of how Notion generates text. I’d prefer more of a copilot-style experience (tab autocomplete, for example), as well as a sidebar that keeps track of AI suggestions rather than a floating pop-up window. My guess is I’m not using Notion AI because that feeling of being in the driver’s seat is not there (yet; Notion is a wonderful product and I have no doubt I will be using their AI features in the future).
An interesting question to ask: which is the right approach? If a language model is so much better than me at performing a task, why should I be in the driver's seat? As LLMs become more powerful, I’m curious how this paradigm evolves. Some tools I’d love to see a copilot-style experience for:
If you're working on any ideas in these spaces, I'd love to chat! I'm luke (at) pebblebed (dot) com.