Cool thanks! I haven’t tried it for troubleshooting, I’ll give that a go when I next need it.

Are you using one integrated into your IDE? Or just standalone in a web browser? That’s probably what I ought to try next (the IDE end of things). I saw an acquaintance using PyCharm’s integrated assistant to auto gen commit messages, that looked cool. Not exactly game changing of course.

Do you feel like elaborating any? I’d love to find more uses. So far I’ve mostly found it useful in areas where I’m very unfamiliar. Like I do very little web front end, so when I need to, the option paralysis is gnarly. I’ve found things like Perplexity helpful to allow me to select an approach and get moving quickly. I can spend hours agonizing over those kinds of decisions otherwise, and it’s really poorly spent time.

I’ve also found it useful when trying to answer questions about best practices or comparing approaches. It sorta does the reading and summarizes the points (with links to source material), pretty perfect use case.

So both of those are essentially “interactive text summarization” use cases - my third is as a syntax helper, again in things I don’t work with often. If I’m having a brain fart and just can’t quite remember the ternary operator syntax in that one language I never use…etc. That one’s a bit less impactful but can still be faster than manually inspecting docs, especially if the docs are bad or hard to use.

With that said I use these things less than once a week on average. Possible that’s just down to my own pre-existing habits more than anything else though.

Thanks so much, this is exactly what I was looking for.

I also know exactly what you mean - weirdly, maybe the most potentially harmful thing about cannabis is the way it makes doing nothing tolerable and even enjoyable. I think overuse does lead to a lot of very stunted life trajectories and ultimately unfulfilling time spent on earth for many people. Certainly did for me in my youth. Of course there are the rare folks like my buddy who smokes daily for decades on end and does more stuff than I do.

In myself I’ve noticed that it makes me much more shy and less willing to engage with others when under the influence. Oddly enough I can sometimes be more productive with it, though, because the right dose tends to quiet my otherwise kind of scattered attention and I’ll work on just one thing rather than 4 at once (badly). I write software for a living and a small dose actually helps me just grind out some boring code that needs to get written. But like you said it limits depth so it’s not good for thinking about project structure and decision making. And at higher doses it does leave me very content with doing very little - at least in the moment.

Anyway. I’ll keep my eye on it, thanks for relating your experience!

Would you be willing to elaborate on the negative effects you observed that led to your decision to drop it? I gave up alcohol this year - I’ve slowly been adding in cannabis lately and want to watch for issues with overuse and such.