Useful things:

- As a thesaurus

- What's the name of that "thing" that does "something" - kind of like fuzzy matching

- A starting point for writing particular functions. For example, I wanted a certain string-manipulation function written in C, and it gave me a decent skeleton. However they're almost always very inefficient, so I have to optimize them.

Things I've tried, that others seem to be blown away by, that I find useless:

- Rewriting emails or documentation: I see no clarity improvement from ChatGPT rewording what I say, and sometimes information is lost in the process.

- Outliner or idea prompter: I don't see an improvement over just traditional internet search and reading over various articles and books.

For me, its capabilities do not match the marketing and hype. It's basically just a slightly better search engine. All of the above use-cases can be accomplished with some Google-fu. For people who don't know any programming or about using search engine operators, I could see why they might be impressed by it.