Just a loose collection of not so much oh shit moments, but moments that changed the way I think about it as a tool:

- I asked Claude a question about an obscure game for which there wasn't a lot of discussion or information on the web. It couldn't find the answer but it found the source code and was able to figure it out and give a complete response.

- I needed to make some edits to a minified lottie file (json that is used to produce an animation in svg or other formats). ChatGPT was able to understand the file well enough to make the edits and reproduce the rest of the content exactly as it was.

- I was working on some map features and I needed to take geolocation information and position HTML elements on the edges of a container that would indicate which direction from the current location they were. This required a lot of geometry and math that account for rotation and pitch and would have taken me some time to work through, but it was just a few seconds for the language model and it worked perfectly.

- I have some petunias that I haven't managed to kill and I heard that when a stem breaks off they can be replanted. I asked it how to do this and after warning me that selling these could constitute a black market, it helped me start several petunia plants that are thriving. My petunias are basically immortal now.

I empathize with the astroturfing concern, I file almost every statement released by Anthropic/OpenAI as bullshit. But they are an amazing tool given the right circumstances.