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Comment by senthil_rajasek | Hacker News Reader

What type of tasks do you get help from ChatGPT?

Curious to know some solid use cases of productivity improvements in real world?

I've been teaching myself how to do low-level graphics programming using Apple's Metal API with assistance from ChatGPT. It can rapidly explain concepts, provide example snippets, explain error messages and suggest corrections, explain concepts, and provide steps.

Apple's Metal API suffers from a weak ecosystem of third-party documentation and examples (unlike OpenGL), and Apple's documentation is barebones, so having a tool like ChatGPT that can interact with that entire space conversationally is a huge boon.

Sometimes it suggests erroneous approaches. When that happens, I can ask it for alternatives. It's not actually too troublesome to vet the information since it has to actually work on the hardware, and honestly, I feel like I'm learning it more deeply by trying the different ways anyway.

Update on this: I’ve reached the point where I’m comfortable cracking open the 300pg Metal Programming Guide and jumping directly to the section covering what I’m interested in learning about. I’ve switched to using ChatGPT to generate example shaders that use particular techniques. It’s still extremely valuable, but there’s a level of organization or strategic thinking that’s missing in the responses provided.

I've used it pretty successfully to grammar check emails. I write a rough version and ask chatGPT to check it. It usually comes back with a slightly tweaked version that I use parts from.

Also, naming things.

I asked to it generate team trivia name suggestions based on some parameters. It did a good job and some were funny. ChatGPT can be very creative.

I used it to make a nicely stylized prototype web app for a company using local storage for data in a few hours. Maybe I’m just not very competent at that stuff but the css I feel would have taken me hours alone

writing splunk queries, they are often wrong but close enough that I can edit it into working

I was just wondering about this the other day, glad to see it's got some capability there.

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