These days I use ChatGPT 4, with a long running conversation where I explain what I’m trying to do, what tools I’m using, paste in sections of code that I don’t understand, asking how to change the behaviour of that code, give it error messages I’m seeing, etc.

It feels really close to pair programming with someone sitting next to me who knows the language/framework. The code it writes is often wrong but it’s close enough that I can work reasonably efficiently.

A couple favourite from earlier todays

1. I asked “where can I find the code that does X” and it told me to search the project for “Y” to find it.
2. I asked it how to use a code generation shell script bundled with the framework to do a common task, and when I explained that the answer didn’t seem to line up it said “in that case you can’t use the script. You’ll need to write the code manually, here’s how to do that”

Both pieces of advice were spot on and saved me hours of googling.