The question is, do you actually save time by coaxing the language model into an answer or would you just save time by writing it yourself?
I have this friend who gets obsessed with things very easily and ChatGPT got to him quite a bit. He spent about two months perfecting his AI persona and starts every chat with several hundred words of directions before asking any questions. I find that this also produces the wrong answers many times.
For me it saves time by keeping my momentum up. I don’t lean on it when I’m in a flow state and cruising through the code I’m writing but as soon as I hit a wall I jump over to chat and start working on a solution with it. This saves a huge amount of time that would otherwise be spent banging my head against the keyboard or googling or reading random SO posts and dev blogs and documentation or even just the time wasted when I get frustrated enough to stop working on the problem and wind up browsing hn.
I have this friend who gets obsessed with things very easily and ChatGPT got to him quite a bit. He spent about two months perfecting his AI persona and starts every chat with several hundred words of directions before asking any questions. I find that this also produces the wrong answers many times.