P != NP in my experience. In many cases, it is indeed much faster to check a "proof" that ChatGPT spits out than to come up with one yourself.

The problem is that doing this enough will make you forget how to come up with proofs in the first place.

There are different use-cases I'm using it with.

Sometimes I can write the code, but I just think it's too tedious and AI can do it faster than me. For example I can write `jq` incantations, but it takes some time and man digging, so for non-trivial cases I can easily spend hour tinkering with it. ChatGPT often do it in one minute and does it correctly. So in this case I can perfectly evaluate the result. Although I've recently started to avoid this kind of usage, because I feel it makes me dumber and my salary is not increased for the time saved, so I don't really have an incentive to work slightly faster at the expense of my mental abilities.

Sometimes I'm using it as a Google replacement. Now this is controversial usage and I certainly can't quickly evaluate if he did a good job. I'm usually inspecting list of "Sources" and double-checking the most important facts. If I feel it missed important sources, I'm going to search myself.

Sometimes I just need an opinion. I work mostly alone and I don't have anyone to talk to. Also I have some mental issues, where I can stuck on very simple issue, like identifier naming and procrastinate over it for a prolonged time. AI had been a saviour for me, because he can present another opinion which I could just follow and move on (because it doesn't really matter, which identifier name to use). So for this case, there's no "right" or "wrong" answer, I just need "some" answer. I could even use RNG but actually ChatGPT makes me feel better by following seemingly reasonable suggestions.

Often I write code and submit it to ChatGPT for review. It spots a lot of irrelevant issues, or issues I don't really care about. However sometimes it finds a bugs, so it helps me a lot by uncovering bugs early. In this case, verification is obvious, I know when the bug is bug.

>If you have to double check everything, is it really saving time?

What if it gets you most of the way there and you don't care so much about the quality (and thus don't feel any urge to double-check), though?

Which, I expect, is the most common case: people using it to churn half-arsed work faster and with no effort from them.

I guess there are two cases.

If I'm asking for my own enlightenment but don't care about a correct answer, then why bother?

If my manager is fine with a half-assed response, then eventually he'll cut me out altogether and go straight to the AI.

It's a shame that software engineering hasn't progressed to the point were we can reliably build bug free software. It's really sad if AI gives shitty results but iterates fast enough that it's still perceived as better than real humans.