Yeah, that's how I feel about it as well.

For a large chunk of my life, I would start a personal project, get stuck on some annoying detail (e.g. the server gives some arcane error), get annoyed, and abandoned the project. I'm not being paid for this, and for unpaid work I have a pretty finite amount of patience.

With ChatGPT, a lot of the time I can simply copypaste the error and get it to give me ideas on paths forward. Sometimes it's right on the first try, often it's not, but it gives me something to do, and once I'm far enough along in the project I've developed enough momentum to stay inspired.

It still requires a lot of work on my end to do these projects, AI just helps with some of the initial hurdles.

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czbond 2 days ago | parent [-]

> For a large chunk of my life, I would start a personal project, get stuck on some annoying detail ...

I am the same way. I did Computer Science because it was a combination of philosophy and meta thinking. Then when I got out, it was mainly just low level errors, dependencies, and language nuance.

	▲	tombert 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah exactly. I did CS because I love math and computability theory and logic and distributed computation, and I will have an interesting enough idea I want to play with, but I'll get stuck on some bullshit with Kubernetes or systemd or Zookeeper or firewalls or something that's decidedly not an interesting problem for me, but something necessary that I need to actually do my idea. Being able to get ChatGPT to generate basic scaffold stuff, or look at errors, help me resolve dependencies, or even just bounce ideas off of, really helps me maintain progress. You could argue that I'm not learning as much than if I fought through it, and that's probably true, but I am absolutely learning more than I would have if I had just quit the project like I usually did.