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by loveparade 1135 days ago
The use case where it's really good is boilerplate code that you may not remember. For example, I haven't written React code for years now. I know what good React code looks like when I see it because I've worked with it before, but I wouldn't be able to implement something from scratch without googling or copying stuff from Github. I just don't remember the libraries and best practices off the top of my head.

When I ask ChatGPT to do it for me it gives me an excellent starting point. Sure, there will be bugs, but because I know what I want I can spot and fix them immediately. It's much faster to adjust ChatGPT's code than it is to Google around for starting points.

Another example are shell scripts. I only touch bash once every few months and I keep forgetting the syntax for certain operations. Asking ChatGPT to give me a starting point is much faster than googling and visiting 20 StackOverflow posts for what I want.

But I agree with you that for day-to-day work on the same codebase where you have all the context, ChatGPT usually isn't worth it.