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Comment by agentgumshoe | Hacker News Reader

Does it help you learn better spelling and grammar, or do you just stop thinking about it? Is that a good thing long term?

Same with dev. Does it actually make you better, or does it make you not think about learning so much?

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> Does it help you learn better spelling and grammar...

Yes. (Of course I still have a long way to go)

> Same with dev. Does it actually make you better...

Also yes. In terms of "scripting" it helped me tremendously. There were many little tasks that I wouldn't bother to automate without ChatGPT, because the time spent on looking up those niche APIs would outweight the time saved.

Without ChatGPT I would have learned 0 about them. With ChatGPT at least I learned a bit.

Did you though? Can you remember any of those solutions that ChatGPT provided or why? Or are you now going to ChatGPT more and more because easier?

Not OP, but for me the higher level decisions stick, but not the bitty gritty detail. And I'm ok with that, I care less about the implementation detail and more about the higher level problem solving, and using these LLMs I feel make me better at that.

For English writing I remember a lot of words and phrases that ChatGPT taught me.

For scripting, of course I don't remember the details it provided. I don't remember the details I wrote yesterday either. But at least I roughly remember things like "There is a simple way to visualize any f(x) with about 10~20 lines of numpy and matplotlib. It's not a daunting task at all". I believe these pieces of information improve my decision making a little bit.

I don't think ChatGPT improved the deeper programming skill of mine, like data struct/algorithm/architecture. But I see no reason why it would make me worse in this aspect either.

This is indeed a valid question, but I think it’s largely up to the user. For me, as a hobbyist programmer that sometimes writes code at work to automate certain tasks, I use ChatGPT to quickly create boilerplate/template type code AND to learn how to do new things. When I’m asking how to do something new, I try to actually learn what’s going on so that I won’t have to keep asking about that particular issue. But yeah, the temptation to just say “thanks, ChatGPT” and move on without learning anything is certainly there and could be quite harmful to one’s overall coding skills.

I think the interesting part of that is, is there money in it? I could see it being useful for hobbyists that don't care about programming that much, but would you pay for that?

I am not the OP you are referring to, but I am non-native and this is anecdotal but when I grew up and used the internet I learned how to spell way better because of the spell check in Firefox. I really doubt I would have been able to spell half as many words as I can correctly spell any other way. I have some random words still that I infrequently use that I always typo, but theres so many other words that I just know how to write out from muscle memory at this point. My only problem is I dont know how to pronounce all words, I sometimes find a word and get really confused, not too often, but often enough.

I think AI could help me if ChatGPT or whatever else had proper text to speech with a reasonably convincing accent, even if it sounds off, as long as the accents American I am good to go.

I am also a pessimist with AI but I still try it out and use it because I do see it being used more and more.

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