[warner25]

I felt similarly about using ChatGPT until a few months ago.

I took some pride in having almost 20 years of (on-and-off) programming experience, I felt that it was one of my strengths as an older CS graduate student, and I didn't look forward to trading my traditional programming workflow for "prompt engineering." I also generally avoid adopting more complex tools because I think it can lead to spending more time figuring out the tools than using them to accomplish things (i.e. "yak shaving").

But a few months ago my advisor showed me how other people are using ChatGPT to accelerate their work, like having a research assistant, and he basically said that we're falling behind if we're not using it too. Within a month of starting to use it this summer, I knew he was right. Tasks that would previously take me a week to do now take a day or even just an hour. I do worry that it's making me lazier in some cases, but I haven't stopped learning either. I mostly use the output of ChatGPT like I'd use example code from tutorials or StackOverflow; it's less copying-and-pasting exact code and more taking the examples and rewriting or modifying them to do exactly what I want.

The ability to get instant answers to my questions when I don't understand how something works, or when I'm debugging / troubleshooting, has absolutely increased my learning rather than stunting it.