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I agree with you. It feels like a clever human on "fast thinking" mode, as Kahneman would call it. So when I ask a programming question, it feels like a master student answers the first thing that comes to mind. If you ask an explanation, the first explanation that comes to mind is blurted out.

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I asked it about string formatting deduplication and it suggested using a HashSet since it deduplicates strings, and I’m like “are you sure that’s the best way to do this?” Then it apologized and gave a much more “standard” way the second time I asked.

You definitely need to know a little and be able to push back, it feels like. But it’s been an absolute champ in describing why things are going wrong in a general sense when I’ve been having issues, especially with generics and templates in C#.

(Which is why prompt engineering is a thing! The art/science of phrasing the prompt so that the immediate blurted response is more likely to be correct.)

prompt-engineering to get the answer is analogous to prompting the fortune teller to tell your future - ie, you have an intended answer that you expect (or wish for in the case of a fortune teller), and you tweak the prompts to get there.

Well, you might not know the answer, even if you know some properties the answer must have and some processes that might lead to the answer.

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