I found ChatGPT most useful for writing regular text.
Writing Cover Letters
As unbelievable as it sounds - yes sadly there are still some companies that require you to send a Cover Letter or ask you questions like - "Why would you like to work for our company?". And you can't write just - 'For the money' because there is a stupid character limit of however many minimum characters are required. I find this to be idiotic so I simply generate some very generic BS text with ChatGPT.
I write:
Please give me a professional response for - "Why would you like to work for our company" - for a frontend developer position.
and I get:
I am excited about the opportunity to work for your company because I believe that it is a dynamic and innovative organization that values creativity and technical excellence. I have a passion for front-end development and I am confident that I can bring a unique perspective to your team. I have been following your company for some time now, and I am impressed by your commitment to creating cutting-edge solutions for your clients. Your emphasis on collaboration, open communication, and continuous learning aligns with my own professional values, and I am eager to be a part of a team that is dedicated to making a meaningful impact in the industry. I believe that I would thrive in your company's culture and I am eager to contribute to its success.
Improving My Resume
I had to do a lot in terms of improving my resume and making it look and sound more professional. I was making the mistake of writing things in a far too technical way, where for example I might have something like -
"I used Angular and Rxjs in combination with the Angular HTTP client to make API calls to the backend"
It was later explained to me that this information when read by someone with little or no technical background, wouldn't mean much...
So I asked ChatGPT to -
please make this sound more professional for my resume - "I used Angular and Rxjs in combination with the Angular HTTP client to make API calls to the backend" and remove all mentions of technologies.
Yes, I am usually far too polite and I often start my requests with 'please'. So I got the following response:
I leveraged technology to develop and implement API integrations with the backend system, utilizing industry-standard practices to ensure efficient and effective communication between systems. My expertise in these areas allows me to bring a strong skillset to the table, enabling me to make significant contributions to any project I work on.
Writing Blog Posts
For blog posts - I lay out my blog post ideas and my main points and if I want my paragraphs to be longer or shorter - I use ChatGPT to help organize the structure of the blog post better. Of course, I could do it by myself too, but ChatGPT saves me a considerable amount of time and it is also great at elaborating - making things longer, sometimes a bit too long 😉
I use ChatGPT to enhance what I have already written - I don't just let it run in the background and do everything for me.
Let's say that I write an average of about 2 blog posts in a normal week without GhatGPT, with ChatGPT - I can raise this number to 10, or something close to that. I have so many blog post ideas, but I haven't been able to find the time to write all of them, so I just collect them in a very long TODO list. So in reality, ChatGPT is just helping me keep up with my tasks & TODOs better.
My usual workflow is - I write a blog post (for example), I give it to ChatGPT - I have a look at what ChatGPT gives back, I take only the good parts and I try to incorporate them into my work. Sometimes I don't need to do a lot of re-writing, but there are many times when it loses the point that I am trying to make. I find it better for handling smaller segments of text... Unless it is a completely fabricated story and then whatever it gives back can work.
Collecting Information
I use it also for collecting and gathering information, especially in cases where I need different data from different sources. Instead of going through each site individually I just specify the type of data or information that I need. If I need citable sources, ChatGPT can provide them too in the format I need them to be.
NOT FOR WRITING CODE
Maybe if I need just a random tiny code snippet, that is taken out of context and just serves as a basic example - then it can provide pretty accurate content.
However, for actual coding, working on any project that has some context or parts that are supposed to work together or improving programming logic, like making a function work -> I found it to be completely useless and very frustrating.
Even when I know the exact bug that needs fixing and the exact problem I am facing and I tell ChatGPT - it still fails miserably. It just provides completely unrelated information that may be valid, but not applicable to my scenario. For now - it is much faster if I debug or write any type of code that involves logic, entirely by myself.
That is just my experience with it, I am sure that it will get better and also everyone's experience will probably be different, but I would only recommend it for generating, restructuring or correcting - regular text. Blog posts, essays, stories - things like that. It is definitely not an all-in-one solution for everything. It is a tool that is part of the process and can potentially help you save some time, but you still need to do a lot of the work yourself and you must keep an eye on it.
A hidden benefit
Writing has never been something that comes naturally to me, I am a lot more of a verbal person and that is why I much rather make videos. But ever since I started using ChatGPT for writing my blog posts - I have been more active and more inspired.
I do not procrastinate as much as before. That is because now I know that the average amount of time that it takes me to write a blog post, even a very long blog post, has decreased significantly and I don't need to figure out - 'when am I going to find the time for this long and dreadful thing'... With GhatGPT - writing has become a lot more enjoyable experience. I still don't love it - but it has become a lot more manageable.
And now that I think of it - I do not like writing blog posts very much, but on the other hand - I love writing my code 😊 That is probably the underlying reason why I would not let ChatGPT 'take over my code' - it's my fun activity, it's for me to do. But hey, for the stuff I like less - I can surely use the help.
I probably should start mentioning this -> ChatGPT was not used in the creation of this blog post ;) That is not to say that if this message is not present, then ChatGPT was used -> I will be adding an acknowledgment widget to clarify when ChtGPT was used for enhancements.