But... they're things that require research. Do you know how to loop through all of your Apple Notes using AppleScript off the top of your head?

That research isn't free: it takes time.

As someone who hasn't done much work with AppleScript before, I would guess it would take me about half an hour to figure out how to do this. But there's a risk that it might take longer.

So the sensible thing is probably not to take on that project at all! I don't care enough about solving it to invest the research time.

But the time taken to chuck a prompt through GPT-4 and then test the results to see if it works is less than a minute.

I wrote more about how this is encouraging me to be more ambitious with my projects here: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/27/ai-enhanced-developmen...

I work in Deep Learning Research. I don't get any help at all from ChatGPT for my core job. Copilot spews gibberish, too.

I do get enough help about peripherals. Some weeks ago, I needed help with Flask and HTML deploying a model to show it to stakeholders. (I learned Flask some years ago, but not needing it regularly, I forgot enough.)

The data cleaning, preprocessing, model training, making it better than humans were the hard tasks.

Deploying a Flask app with a simple HTML frontend was the easy task. But easy != free. It would have required 2-3x more time researching how to do exactly what I needed, which I did with Copilot and ChatGPT in ~1 hr.

Also, take a look at the problems and projects simonw actually tackles.

If someone on my team was doing things this unusually they’d probably be let go.