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How many of you are using ChatGpt to help you with your work, and not telling your boss/co-workers?

Just out of curiosity. I have no moral stance on it, if a tool works for you I'm definitely not judging anyone for using it. Do whatever you can to get your work done!

189 comments
  • not chatGPT - but I tried using copilot for a month or two to speed up my work (backend engineer). Wound up unsubscribing and removing the plugin after not too long, because I found it had the opposite effect.

    Basically instead of speeding my coding up, it slowed it down, because instead of my thought process being

    1. Think about the requirements
    2. Work out how best to achieve those requirements within the code I'm working on
    3. Write the code

    It would be

    1. Think about the requirements
    2. Work out how best to achieve those requirements within the code I'm working on
    3. Start writing the code and wait for the auto complete
    4. Read the auto complete and decide if it does exactly what I want
    5. Do one of the following depending on 4 5a. Use the autocomplete as-is 5b. Use the autocomplete then modify to fix a few issues or account for a requirement it missed 5c. Ignore the autocomplete and write the code yourself

    idk about you, but the first set of steps just seems like a whole lot less hassle then the second set of steps, especially since for anything that involved any business logic or internal libraries, I found myself using 5c far more often than the other two. And as a bonus, I actually fully understand all the code committed under my username, on account of actually having wrote it.

    I will say though in the interest of fairness, there were a few instances where I was blown away with copilot's ability to figure out what I was trying to do and give a solution for it. Most of these times were when I was writing semi-complex DB queries (via Django's ORM), so if you're just writing a dead simple CRUD API without much complex business logic, you may find value in it, but for the most part, I found that it just increased cognitive overhead and time spent on my tickets

    EDIT: I did use chatGPT for my peer reviews this year though and thought it worked really well for that sort of thing. I just put in what I liked about my coworkers and where I thought they could improve in simple english and it spat out very professional peer reviews in the format expected by the review form

  • When I'm pissed off I use it to make my emails sound friendly.

  • I find it helpful to translate medical abbreviations to English. Our doctors tend to go overboard with abbreviations, there are lots I know but there are always a few that leave me scratching my head. ChatGPT seems really good at guessing what they mean! There are other tools I can use, but ChatGPT is faster and more convenient - I can give it context and that makes it more accurate.

  • We openly use it and abuse of it from top to bottom of the company and for me add Co-Pilot to that as well

  • My job actively encourages using AI to be more efficient and rewards curiosity/creative approaches. I'm in IT management.

  • I use it as a search engine for the LLVM docs.

    Works so much better than doxygen.

    But it's no secret.

  • I use it at work but gladly tell the boss... It's only pluses if we can do more trivial work faster. More time to relax. They don't watch what I do during the day. The boss relaxes also. All good.

  • Aside from asking it coding questions (which are generally a helpful pointer in the right direction), i also ask it alot of questions like “Turn these values into an array” or something similar when i have to make an array of values (or anything else that’s repetitive) and am too lazy to do it myself. Just a slight speedup in work.

  • As a coder, we have had discussions about using it at work. Everyone's fine with it for generation of test data, or for generating initial code skeletons but it still requires us to review every line. It saves a bit of time but that's all.

189 comments