ChatGPT

Today was the first day where I used ChatGPT for the first time. So far I only read about it from a distance. Blogs, posts, tweets, stuff like that.

Using the Assistant function for Ansible in Code was the closes I came to support my work. And some re-rendered images here and there.

The first time I tried generating an image based on an existing one, I failed miserably. That maybe stopped my enthusiasm a bit.

But I had a problem since yesterday in bash. A trivial one, I admit.

I was in the midst of replacing my Rakefile with just. Don’t ask why. One task in there calculate the restructuredText headline marker by counting the letters in a headline and inserting a line with repeating =-characters.

I could not immediately solve this in bash in a simple one-liner. So I asked ChatGPT how to solve it.

Confidently it gave me a one-liner, but when I tested it, the output was double the amount. A simple mistake, even simpler for me to spot and to correct. Very apologetic ChatGPT corrected itself and gave me a different one-liner based on some other commands this time.

That one worked immediately and needed only minor adjustments.

The experience of not having to break my brain about to solve the problem was a pleasant one. I can only imagine how it must be to work with it all the time and how little effort it must be to write code with it, given the proper input.

At the same time it scares me that I got a result that quick and obvious, specifically adjusted to my needs. The uneasy feeling comes from the trust that I have to put in the code I get in return, that probably just works. Without checking it if it’s working, why it is working and if it is working correctly.

In the end it comes well down to if I can life with the feeling of having created code that I do not completely understand or if it makes me more proud to create my own code, know what I did, maybe not the best way and put my own effort into it.

Or I might find some common ground.

But what the days that tool is not available any more and I have to rely on myself? I imaging it is a much smaller problem when I am not used to it, than if I would depend on it.