ChatGPT is my first line of thinking

I have been busy chugging away on a small coding experiment and I’ve been using ChatGPT in this really fun way - I’ll just paste in my entire program and simply ask it why it isn’t working the way it is supposed to.

Surprisingly, it’s often right. It’s amazing how often it can just encapsulate the entire program instantly like that and tell me exactly where and why the program is not working. I wish I could have a working memory in my head too which worked like this.

It has saved me from having to exert a lot of mental energy for initial smaller challenges which pop up along the way. What has surprised me the most is how often I do it without even realizing. It’s just great for testing the waters before any particular step along the journey.

ChatGPT really is some kind of first line of thinking, I dispatch it as a first line of offense unsparingly, especially in the early stages of development. I feel like we’re all constantly trying to conserve energy and save time as much as possible, and AI is just accelerating this preference.

It’s worth emphasizing that I think this is particularly valuable for coding in the early stages of development, but I can’t speak to other domains. It may not always be the best choice as a starting line for attacking a problem, especially if you take its answers too seriously and never really question them or think for yourself. Also, sometimes it can just be too conventional. The good part about coding is that it can be a narrower domain and ChatGPT excels at it, making it a helpful problem solving tool.