I often use it as a thesaurus. "Words that mean X" or even "that situation X me and I was annoyed - give me options for X"
For programming, all sorts of things. I use it all the time for programming languages that I'm not fluent in, like AppleScript or bash/zsh/jq. One recent example: https://til.simonwillison.net/gpt3/chatgpt-applescript
I use it as a rapid prototyping tool. I got it to build me a textarea I could paste TSV values into to preview that data as a table recently, one prompt produced exactly the prototype I wanted: https://github.com/simonw/datasette-paste-table/issues/1
I use it for brainstorming. "Give me 40 ideas for Datasette plugins involving AI" - asking for 40 ideas means that even if the first ten are generic and obvious there will be some interesting ones further down the list.
It's fantastic for explaining code that I don't understand: just paste it in and it will break down what it's doing, then I can ask follow up questions about specific syntax to get further deeper explanations.
Similar to that, I use it for jargon all the time. I'll even paste in a tweet and say "what did this mean by X?" and it will tell me. It's great for decoding abstracts from academic papers.
For programming, all sorts of things. I use it all the time for programming languages that I'm not fluent in, like AppleScript or bash/zsh/jq. One recent example: https://til.simonwillison.net/gpt3/chatgpt-applescript
I use it as a rapid prototyping tool. I got it to build me a textarea I could paste TSV values into to preview that data as a table recently, one prompt produced exactly the prototype I wanted: https://github.com/simonw/datasette-paste-table/issues/1
I use it for brainstorming. "Give me 40 ideas for Datasette plugins involving AI" - asking for 40 ideas means that even if the first ten are generic and obvious there will be some interesting ones further down the list.
I used it to generate an OpenAPI schema when I wrote my first ChatGPT plugin, see prompt in https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/24/datasette-chatgpt-plug...
It's fantastic for explaining code that I don't understand: just paste it in and it will break down what it's doing, then I can ask follow up questions about specific syntax to get further deeper explanations.
Similar to that, I use it for jargon all the time. I'll even paste in a tweet and say "what did this mean by X?" and it will tell me. It's great for decoding abstracts from academic papers.
It's good for discovering command line tools - it taught me about the macOS "sips" tool a few weeks ago: https://til.simonwillison.net/macos/sips