The part I’m calling out as untrue is the „magic 8 ball” comment, because it directly contradicts my own personal lived experience. Yes it’s a lying, noisy, plagiarism machine, but its accuracy for certain kinds of questions is better than a coin flip and the wrong answers can be useful as well.

Some recent examples

• I had it write an excel formula that I didn’t know how to write, but could sanity check and test.
• Worked through some simple, testable questions about setting up project references in a typescript project
• I want to implement URL previews in a web project but I didn’t know what the standard for that is called. Every web search I could think of related to „url previews” is full of SEO garbage I don’t care about, but ChatGPT immediately gave me the correct answer (Open Graph meta tags), easily verified by searching for that and reading the public documentation.
• Naming things is a famously hard problem in programming and LLMs are pretty good at „what’s another way to say” and „what’s it called when” type questions.

Just because you don’t have the problems that LLMs solve doesn’t mean that nobody else does. And also, dude, don’t scold people on the internet. The fediverse has a reputation and it’s not entirely a good one.