OpenAI released something today called ChatGPT, and it caught my attention.

It is a conversational AI system that is supposed to be able to answer questions, follow up on previous parts of a conversation, admit mistakes, and even challenge incorrect assumptions.

I have not had a chance to spend any real time with it yet, but the idea is interesting.

We have had search engines, code completion, voice assistants and plenty of other tools that can help find information or automate small tasks, but having a back-and-forth conversation with a system that can respond to context feels like a different kind of interaction.

I am especially curious to see how useful it might be for software development. Can it explain code? Help work through a problem? Generate something useful, or will it mostly produce answers that look convincing but still need to be checked carefully?

I do not know yet.

For now, it is one more thing on my list to try.