[dandellion]

I'm not a native English speaker and ChatGPT is the best existing tool to spell check and fix gramatical errors in emails. Copilot is another very useful application, and I think your dismissal of it is invalid. Even if we accept that Copilot hurts new devs (which I don't know if you have any proof but I'll make the concession that it is a possibility). A double edged sword hurts and helps the same person. I and half the programmers I know who pay a subscription for Copilot already know how to program perfectly well.

[ChatGTP]

As someone on the receiving end of these types of LLM enhanced emails, I'd say just make sure you actually can be confident it is indeed communicating your message properly.

I work with a guy who has been covering up his poor use of the English language and it's been quite weird to be honest.

Fluent soudning emails full of convincing sounding gibberish is what I've been receiving. Unfortunately the guy just isn't good a communicating his ideas using written language and the LLM can't really fix that.

[dandellion]

When I put in the prompt to correct spelling and grammar it rarely changes anything else. Sometimes I'll use it to reword things but I'll make sure the meaning is clear. I read a lot more English than I write so usually telling if something "sounds natural" is very easy, even if writing doesn't come as easy.

[agentgumshoe]

Does it help you learn better spelling and grammar, or do you just stop thinking about it? Is that a good thing long term?

Same with dev. Does it actually make you better, or does it make you not think about learning so much?

[raincole]

> Does it help you learn better spelling and grammar...

Yes. (Of course I still have a long way to go)

> Same with dev. Does it actually make you better...

Also yes. In terms of "scripting" it helped me tremendously. There were many little tasks that I wouldn't bother to automate without ChatGPT, because the time spent on looking up those niche APIs would outweight the time saved.

Without ChatGPT I would have learned 0 about them. With ChatGPT at least I learned a bit.

[agentgumshoe]

Did you though? Can you remember any of those solutions that ChatGPT provided or why? Or are you now going to ChatGPT more and more because easier?

[raincole]

For English writing I remember a lot of words and phrases that ChatGPT taught me.

For scripting, of course I don't remember the details it provided. I don't remember the details I wrote yesterday either. But at least I roughly remember things like "There is a simple way to visualize any f(x) with about 10~20 lines of numpy and matplotlib. It's not a daunting task at all". I believe these pieces of information improve my decision making a little bit.

I don't think ChatGPT improved the deeper programming skill of mine, like data struct/algorithm/architecture. But I see no reason why it would make me worse in this aspect either.

[danielbln]

Not OP, but for me the higher level decisions stick, but not the bitty gritty detail. And I'm ok with that, I care less about the implementation detail and more about the higher level problem solving, and using these LLMs I feel make me better at that.

[ExtremisAndy]

This is indeed a valid question, but I think it’s largely up to the user. For me, as a hobbyist programmer that sometimes writes code at work to automate certain tasks, I use ChatGPT to quickly create boilerplate/template type code AND to learn how to do new things. When I’m asking how to do something new, I try to actually learn what’s going on so that I won’t have to keep asking about that particular issue. But yeah, the temptation to just say “thanks, ChatGPT” and move on without learning anything is certainly there and could be quite harmful to one’s overall coding skills.

[agentgumshoe]

I think the interesting part of that is, is there money in it? I could see it being useful for hobbyists that don't care about programming that much, but would you pay for that?

[giancarlostoro]

I am not the OP you are referring to, but I am non-native and this is anecdotal but when I grew up and used the internet I learned how to spell way better because of the spell check in Firefox. I really doubt I would have been able to spell half as many words as I can correctly spell any other way. I have some random words still that I infrequently use that I always typo, but theres so many other words that I just know how to write out from muscle memory at this point. My only problem is I dont know how to pronounce all words, I sometimes find a word and get really confused, not too often, but often enough.

I think AI could help me if ChatGPT or whatever else had proper text to speech with a reasonably convincing accent, even if it sounds off, as long as the accents American I am good to go.

I am also a pessimist with AI but I still try it out and use it because I do see it being used more and more.