For being productive? Not at all for the most part. I haven't really found anything that I do that I can punt to ChatGPT. I guess I could have used it to help me write this response, but what would have been the point?
The little bit of time I spend messing with it (and Bard now that I have access) is mostly just for fun; trying different jailbreaks and creating ridiculous scenarios and seeing what kind of reaction I can get get from the bot.
To be fair, the one time I did try ChatGPT for something productive it was kinda helpful. I asked it to generate some Apache mod_rewrite rules for me for a particular scenario I was working on. What it generated wasn't exactly what I needed, but that could have been down to me not prompting it as well as I might have. Still, even with having to hand-tweak the output a bit it probably did save me some time, but not a massive amount.
All of that said, I'm sure the day is coming when I find some uses that fit my workflows, but I spend most of my time reading, researching, and experimenting with new stuff (but mostly using programming languages I already know well). So there just aren't a lot of obvious places to insert ChatGPT / Bard right now.
I'm pretty much the same. I don't find significant productivity gains from using it - maybe because I have a specific way of doing things already. For instance, I know it's better for me to understand React/whatever framework rather than letting chatgpt write the react state/reducers/etc and all that stuff.
I can definitely use it for emails and have used to simplify exec emails in my company but that's just it.
I'm fascinated by people saying they use GPT for boilerplate. Whenever I find myself doing simple/repetitive stuff, I tend to stop in my tracks and make that go away. Usually following the rule of three: If I do something for a second time, I don't generalise/generate just yet. If I need it a third time, I sit down and do it. Is that unusual? That said, I am mostly working with high level languages that make this generalisation relatively easy.
Where I have found GPT and/or tools like that somewhat useful when playing with them is in writing tests.
Boilerplate code is usually refactor-able away, yes.
But tests are kind of intrinsically boilerplate by definition. There are test and fuzzing and provability systems that definitely help automate. But on the whole, writing a test harness + unit tests is often like writing the whole system over again.
I feel like this might be the one long term useful thing I get out of these coding assistants for my own work: read this interface and implementation I've written. Now write a boatload of negative test cases to verify correctness.
The little bit of time I spend messing with it (and Bard now that I have access) is mostly just for fun; trying different jailbreaks and creating ridiculous scenarios and seeing what kind of reaction I can get get from the bot.
To be fair, the one time I did try ChatGPT for something productive it was kinda helpful. I asked it to generate some Apache mod_rewrite rules for me for a particular scenario I was working on. What it generated wasn't exactly what I needed, but that could have been down to me not prompting it as well as I might have. Still, even with having to hand-tweak the output a bit it probably did save me some time, but not a massive amount.
All of that said, I'm sure the day is coming when I find some uses that fit my workflows, but I spend most of my time reading, researching, and experimenting with new stuff (but mostly using programming languages I already know well). So there just aren't a lot of obvious places to insert ChatGPT / Bard right now.