Troubleshooting

My dad texts me a compiler error he’s run into and asks if I’ve seen it before. I haven’t, so I start researching the issue. It looks like he’s using a different build system than the one I use, and so I start looking into—

My phone vibrates. “chatgpt has given me a reasonable answer to try.”

As my dad goes off to try out the advice of his new AI child, I think through the implications. Computer-related troubleshooting has been one of the things I have done for friends and family for decades. While I have come to rely more heavily on ChatGPT for my own debugging needs, it’s another thing to realize that those who may have come to me in the past have it as an option as well. That’s both a relief and a little humbling.

I check in with my dad on how the advice has gone. He hasn’t tried it out yet, but the steps he describes sound reasonable to me. With some luck, this will address the residual errors, and it will compile before lunch.