I've never used it. I play around with a local installation sometimes, that's the extent of my experience with AI.
this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2026
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I initially subscribed to ChatGPT because I got a job as the only devops guy at an organization, when I had very limited devops experience, and ChatGPT essentially served as my mentor. I justified keeping it for a long time because it helped my productivity; bugs that I had no idea where to start with could be worked through given a few hours (or days) of back-and-forth.
As I climbed the learning curve, ChatGPT became proportionally less helpful, but I kept it because it's kind of useful for rubber ducky debugging. I did find Copilot to be pretty handy for writing docstrings (especially for keeping consistent formatting conventions), but the actual code completions were more annoying than anything.
When all was said and done, I cancelled my ChatGPT and Copilot subscriptions because I'm taking on a mortgage tomorrow and I literally just can't afford them. I have Ollama running on my homelab server, but I only have enough vRAM for a 7B-param model, and it kind of sucks ass, but whatever. At the end of the day, I like using my brain.
UPDATE (because I just thought of it after posting): I do think that "AI-as-a-mentor" is a good use-case of AI. It really helped me cut my teeth on the basics of Linux. I often find that it's easier to learn when you have a working example of code or config that you can dissect than to bash your head against the wall just trying to figure out how to get something to run at all in the first place.
For my birthday challenge this year, I'm learning how to read and write Devanagari as a surprise to my Indian grandparents. I asked my local qwen model to generate some worksheets for me to practice with, and it totally flopped. It gave away all the answers. I do think ChatGPT would have done better, but maybe I could have gotten sufficient results with a better GPU.
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Wait. Normal people who use chatgpt just for basic questions are paying for it?
I do know a few people who do. They get access to the better model, and the history is retained so it let's them build on previous stuff. Still stupid to me, because it still give you wrong info.
The point is we can't compete with this saas ai products with our local models that runs on our poor homeservers. Affording a subscription is way more cheaper in shorter term.
Never paid for it, but I would use it here and there. Never again, account deleted.
I "used it" for a few afternoons, to marvel what its capable of. Writing coherent short stories and shitty Weird Al songs that work surprisingly well, but the novelty soon wore off and I have no real use for it. Its like the coolest toy ever, but it can only keep me entertained for so long.
I "used it" about 6 times since then, and every time has just been to demonstrate it for old people who dont know the internet.
It might be helpful to the movement if memes kike this weren't blatantly untrue.
Corporate would still use it 😒
Boycotting ChatGPT. Have to send a message on my iPhone to my friend about it. And then I need to check my emails on my Windows computer. But I am glad I am boycotting ChatGPT.