[matthewtse]

I love and hate it.

For simple things like navigating down one key, or one array entry, I know by heart, and it's incredibly useful. But anything more complicated, and I'm too lazy to lookup the documentation.

jq will fall into the bucket along with sed/awk of "tools I once wished to become an expert on, but will never do so because ChatGPT came along".

Would also put regex into that bucket, but they're so ubiquitous that I've already learned regexes. I wonder if the new wave of coders learning coding via ChatGPT will think of regexes the same way I think of sed/awk.

[slaymaker1907]

I think these very terse languages are precisely the ones you shouldn't unleash ChatGPT on. It needs to be really exact and if it is wrong, you can easily end up with something that is an infinite loop or takes exponential time with respect to the input.

[FredrikMeyer]

My way of using ChatGPT is just to ask it to give me some complicated sed/awk command, and then I can usually understand easily if the command is correct, or easily look it up. So it is very good for learning.

[zimpenfish]

Ok but if "[you] can usually understand easily if the command is correct" or "easily look it up", what do you even need the ChatGPT step for there?

[gugagore]

many problems seem to have the property that it's easier to verify a solution than to come up with one. If someone provides a filled-out sudoku puzzle, it's relatively straightforward to check if they've followed the rules and completed it correctly. However, actually solving the puzzle from scratch requires a different kind of thinking and might take more time.

[matthewtse]

Yes exactly.

I've also found that learning by "ask ChatGPT, paste, verify" is so much faster and more fun than banging my head against concrete to deeply read documentation to reason about something new.

I've started doing this for new programming languages and frameworks as well, and it shortens the learning curve from months down to days.

[zimpenfish]

A fair point.

[magarnicle]

sed became easy for me when I realised it's essentially the the :s[ubstitute] command in Vim.