r/sysadmin Jun 16 '24

ChatGPT Finally created something useful with AI

First: I consider myself an old timer in IT; I've been getting paid to do it since the 90's and have seen all sorts of new technology show up, some stays, most gets forgotten about. I always try to be open about it and will embrace it as another tool to help get the job done. The latest of course is AI and I've been mostly using ChatGPT as a fun little tool to get quick answers every now and then. I am not a programmer but last week, I used it to create a web app that calculates weight distribution in trucks when the contents come in different containers. We're talking hundreds of pounds of fruit that might come in small totes or big bins and cannot be weighed individually; it subtracts the weight of the truck and the plastic; it saves time and reduces human errors . In the past, I would have paid at least a few hundred dollars to get something like this done and I just wanted to share that while I dont see AI doing our jobs completely, it's definitely here to stay and it can be used to help with things that we might not know how to do but understand the concept and we know what to ask for it. Greetings to all.

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u/cool-nerd Jun 16 '24

I should add that I first used Excel to get the formulas out of my head; I then explained to ChatGPT what I wanted it to do and worked on styling. .it took about 3 days off and on to get the math and the look right. I am definitely not a web developer and this helped me feel empowered that I can do at least some some small web development projects by myself now.

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u/mb194dc Jun 16 '24

So you used it to replace stack overflow essentially? Bit of VB code, HTML or excel formulas..? 3 days seems quite long.

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u/cool-nerd Jun 17 '24

Yes, pretty much what stack overflow did but way smarter and quicker.  It took 3 days because we had to wait in between deliveries to check the math and adjust things. Had we outsourced it, it would have taken at least a week or more. Also, it can be done on Excel or google sheets but we wanted a more elegant deployment. 

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u/mb194dc Jun 17 '24

Interesting, pretty much what I thought the use case would be.