> It's really good at breaking down a problem.

It's really good at breaking down solved problems. (Not even: only a specific class of solved problems.)

> My personal life has no corporate IT policy prohibiting me from telling it who slept with whom.

… Please tell me you're not actually telling OpenAI personal details about other people's lives. First of all, that's creepy. Second of all, GDPR Article 2(c):

> 2. This Regulation does not apply to the processing of personal data: […] (c) by a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity;

It feels to me like you're skirting the edge of this exception, if not outright crossing it. Using OpenAI's APIs would probably be fine, but section 3(c) of the OpenAI Terms of use ("Use of Content to Improve Services.") says they'll use ChatGPT input under [0]: that doesn't feel like a purely personal or household activity to me.

> With the expanded context window of GPT4, you might be able to just dump the emails conversation in and ask it questions about the communications.

There are usually specific extra restrictions (beyond GDPR-type stuff) for correspondence – but even ignoring privacy law, that's all sorts of illegal.[1][2] Ignoring law, are you telling the people who send you emails that you're feeding their writing into a training data set?

> Eg "my partner keeps drinking all my alcohol. please help me tell her that's a problem for multiple reasons in a way that facilitates conversation instead of getting combative and abusive and controlling".

This kind of use seems okay to me, provided you trust OpenAI to only use the data for what they say they're using it for.

> What's more salient though is that there are multi-million dollar businesses that don't involve code solving anything as hard as a hard-level leetcode question

No, they involve understanding a large codebase. That's a completely different kind of skill, and not one I expect unenhanced GPT-style models to ever be very good at. GitHub Copilot certainly isn't.

> but explainshell just tells you that without having to scroll through a bunch of documentation about other possible arguments

This kind of thing is great! Having that kind of thing integrated into an IDE is the sort of thing I mean when I say "better tools" – though even better would be a less arcane command-line syntax, where you don't have -f partly cancelling out -t… (Btw, in the absence of -f, would -u or -t be in effect for the sort order? That website, taking sections from the man page, doesn't explain.)

> I wish I was smarter and could just keep all that stuff straight in my head, on top of the problem I'm actually trying to solve.

I don't know of anyone who can. The effective programmers I know solve this problem by choosing vaguely-appropriate tools for the job. (Seriously, `mysql -e` from a bash script‽ sqlite does exist, you know – or Python's mysql library, or Ruby's, or Perl's, or Tcl's – heck, even PHP's would be better than that.)

> but I'm trying to point out that there are swaths of industry solving for X and not Y.

*grumble grumble*. You're not wrong there.

At least you don't have to worry about these things putting you¹ out of a job. Solving for X problems are the hardest problems I have yet encountered, and I've been known to go to considerable lengths to render them unnecessary: without somebody eliminating the problem, somebody's always going to have to do them (even if it's cleaning up after the computer's automatic 80%-correct solution blows up and takes the production database with it).

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[0]: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/5722486-how-your-data-is...

[1]: https://www.guidethroughthelegaljungleblog.com/2008/11/what-...

[2]: http://www.writewords.org.uk/articles/tips6.asp

¹: Or your freakishly-knowledgeable peers who, somehow, have enough holistic understanding that they don't need to look everything up.