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by Kiro 731 days ago
I can ask ChatGPT extremely specific programming questions and get working code solving it. This is not something I can do with a search engine.

Another thing a search engine cannot do that I use ChatGPT for on a daily basis is taking unstructured text and convert it into a specified JSON format.

1 comments

> I can ask ChatGPT extremely specific programming questions and get working code solving it.

I can do the opposite.

From my perspective, it's not useful to dwell on the fact that LLMs are often confidently wrong, or didn't nail a particular niche or edge-case question the first time, and discount the entire model class. That's expecting too much. Of course LLMs constantly don't help solve a given problem. The same is true for any other problem-solving approach.

The useful comparison is between how one would try to solve a problem before versus after the availability of LLM-powered tools. And in my experience, these tools represent a very effective alternative approach to sifting through docs or googling manually quote-enclosed phrases with site:stackoverflow.com that improves my ability to solve problems I care about.