Then, at Christmas family get together, I was chatting to someone I hadn't seen in a year, who's also interested in "techy stuff" and he asked if I'd used ChatGPT. I gave the same "...boring chatbot.." reply and he explained how it could do more than that and could even help write code for you.
Back in post-Chrimbo world, I was trying to work out a way to sort through my huge archive of photos and collate info about EXIF locations and also which photos didn't have EXIF data. I remembered the Christmas convo, fired up ChatGPT and asked it 'How would I write <description of problem> in Go?' and it spewed out some code.
I ran it and it worked [-ish] but also generated a few errors. I pasted each error into ChatGPT and said 'Fix this error' and it amended the code. Rinse and repeat a couple of times, as other errors cropped up and I ended up with some functioning code to do what I wanted to do.
I then asked ChatGPT to translate the same code into Crystal snd then into V and it did the same [although admittedly I could never get the errors out of the V code --too small an amount of training data, methinks!].
Purists may not be too enamoured of such AI-generated code. But, for someone like me who is an ocassional dabbler: ie. interested in tech and occasionally hacks something together to automate <something> on the comp, but is in no way a professional programmer, ChatGPT was a revelation. I could have achieved what I wanted myself. But it would probably have taken me a day or two and lots of internet searching. With ChatGPT's help, I was able to knock together the basic framework in seconds and then spend a few minutes refining it to handle various errors.
Something like this came up in our discussion and it looks like it would make her decision easier unfortunately.
