Do you feel like elaborating any? I’d love to find more uses. So far I’ve mostly found it useful in areas where I’m very unfamiliar. Like I do very little web front end, so when I need to, the option paralysis is gnarly. I’ve found things like Perplexity helpful to allow me to select an approach and get moving quickly. I can spend hours agonizing over those kinds of decisions otherwise, and it’s really poorly spent time.
I’ve also found it useful when trying to answer questions about best practices or comparing approaches. It sorta does the reading and summarizes the points (with links to source material), pretty perfect use case.
So both of those are essentially “interactive text summarization” use cases - my third is as a syntax helper, again in things I don’t work with often. If I’m having a brain fart and just can’t quite remember the ternary operator syntax in that one language I never use…etc. That one’s a bit less impactful but can still be faster than manually inspecting docs, especially if the docs are bad or hard to use.
With that said I use these things less than once a week on average. Possible that’s just down to my own pre-existing habits more than anything else though.
An example I did today was adjusting the existing email functionality of the application I am working on to use handlebars templates. I was able to reformat the existing html stored as variables into the templates, then adjust their helper functions used to distribute the emails to work with handlebars rather than the previous system all in one fell swoop. I could have done it by hand, but it is repetitive work.
I also use it a lot when troubleshooting issues, such as suggesting how to solve error messages when I am having trouble understanding them. Just pasing the error into the chat has gotten me unstuck too many times to count.
It can also be super helpful when trying to get different versions of the packages installed in a code base to line up correctly, which can be absolutely brutal for me when switching between multiple projects.
Asking specific little questions that may take up the of a coworker or the Sr dev lets me understand the specifics of what I am looking at super quickly without wasting peoples time. I work mainly with existing code, so it is really helpful for breaking down other peoples junk if I am having trouble following.
Cool thanks! I haven’t tried it for troubleshooting, I’ll give that a go when I next need it.
Are you using one integrated into your IDE? Or just standalone in a web browser? That’s probably what I ought to try next (the IDE end of things). I saw an acquaintance using PyCharm’s integrated assistant to auto gen commit messages, that looked cool. Not exactly game changing of course.
