I tried ChatGPT after some time it was released and it really surprised me in a very positive way. I didn’t expect to be this amazed by it since I was already following OpenAI and previous GPT models. I never truly interacted with the previous models, just read about what they are capable of, I’m guessing the actual interaction itself and the quality of the dialog was the thing that amazed me and millions of others in the world.

Some of the things I did with it so far are:

Asking things I usually ask google

To me this immediately felt like a better experience than google. You ask things and you get direct answers. Like asking something to another human being who knows a lot of things. Of course you should not trust everything it says but in my experience it was pretty accurate in many things.

Find bugs in pieces of code

There was an instance at work where I had to find bugs in a code written by a customer. They were trying/failing to use our API and sent us some PHP code for me to debug. I looked at the code for some time, searched for some info on GuzzleHttp usage on google, found two problems in the code and wrote a message back in our slack. I think this whole process took me thirty minutes or so. Right after this, I thought about ChatGPT and asked it to find bugs in that piece of code. It actually found the exact two things I previously found and described the whole thing in a much better way than I did, in 30 seconds or so. At this point I was very amazed. An LLM finding bugs in a piece of code? WOW.

Do my nephews highschool homework

My nephew had a homework where she had to write about their trip to Italy as a diary in italian. I know this is bad but just to try we asked ChatGPT to write a diary for a trip in Italy. Amazingly, it wrote about a five day trip to Italy, day by day, with very nice details including restaurants, archeological sites, museums and so on. It actually looked really authentic and this was all done in turkish. Then, of course, we asked it to translate the whole thing to italian. The result, as you might have guessed, was amazing again. We had her homework done in a couple of minutes.

Again, I know the highschool homework thing is somewhat bad or maybe not bad we don’t really know. We had a discussion about this too and I believe time will tell.

Answer formal linkedin messages/emails

Sometimes I’m having a hard time answering formal linkedin messages or similar emails so I started asking ChatGPT to answer them for me. The messages it writes just felt perfect to me and it actually saved me some time too. For example, a recruiter sends a message asking me if I’m available for some position. I just copy that message and tell ChatGPT to write an answer stating that I won’t be available until September. Somehow, when I try to answer these messages myself I always have some doubts about the tone or about the words I use, also english being a second language to me does not help. ChatGPT was really useful about this.

Write better versions of a text

My wife works as an executive assistant and sometimes she has to write messages in english. This process usually has a couple of steps. First she writes the text, then she sends it to me to get some feedback, I check it, make some adjustments and send it back to her. Now I just tell her to ask ChatGPT. ChatGPT does a very good job in this scenario too, it does it so good that my wife told me it was too good to be used by her in some cases.

Find stuff you have trouble remembering

In my case I was trying to find a very old Commodore 64 game which we used to play with my sisters when I was 6-7 years old. It was a platform spaceship game where you battle space enemies. Before ChatGPT I used google to look for the game. As everyone knows, when using google, you have to search something and read through many different websites, watch videos, search images and so on… With ChatGPT you can just ask it to list Commodore 64 games where there’s a spaceship and you move from left to right and you kill enemies. Surprisingly, again, it did a very good job of listing such games. Even if you cannot find what you are looking for in its first answer you can ask it to list more and it will do it. After a couple of messages I think I found what I was looking for but still I am not one hundred percent sure since my memory from that time is not very strong.

There are probably many other things to do and this is just the beginning. I’m excited to see what will happen in the following years.