[simonw]

I never said these problems were hard.

But... they're things that require research. Do you know how to loop through all of your Apple Notes using AppleScript off the top of your head?

That research isn't free: it takes time.

As someone who hasn't done much work with AppleScript before, I would guess it would take me about half an hour to figure out how to do this. But there's a risk that it might take longer.

So the sensible thing is probably not to take on that project at all! I don't care enough about solving it to invest the research time.

But the time taken to chuck a prompt through GPT-4 and then test the results to see if it works is less than a minute.

I wrote more about how this is encouraging me to be more ambitious with my projects here: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/27/ai-enhanced-developmen...

[vhxs]

100% agree with this. I used ChatGPT earlier today to give me networkx code for computing the connected components of a graph and visualizing the graph. This isn't hard to do, but I don't use networkx all that often and I forget the exact API. I could go to read documentation and piece together an example myself, or I could ask ChatGPT for an example, which tends to be much faster than doing the former.

[skepticATX]

I Googled "applescript loop through apple notes" and this was the first result: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/225938/notes-scrip.... Looks exactly like what ChatGPT came up with for you minus the dialog.

I then Googled "applescript print to console" and got this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13653358/how-to-log-obje... ; admittedly this answer took a few minutes to read through, but the second most upvoted answer recommended using log, which your ChatGPT-developed solution (eventually) used.

This all took me < 5 minutes.

[simonw]

Yeah, those StackOverflow posts are the perfect illustration of why I find ChatGPT so much useful for this kind of thing.

Compare them to my original transcript. They don't provide me with enough information: how do I actually run that code?

I got ChatGPT to split me out a zsh script, which caused it to show me how to use "osascript -e ".