6 ways I like to use ChatGPT

I have been a ChatGPT Plus subscriber for about 6 months now. To celebrate, I wrote a blog post about 6 ways I am using it to help me get things done in life and at work.

1. Coding assistant

“Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves” is one of my favourite mottos. I am the type of guy who signs up for new current accounts to get introductory bonuses, and watches two seasons of 1923 in 6 days to avoid any fees beyond the one week free trial. So, it should not come as too much of a surprise that the idea of paying £20 per month for more than one AI assistant really grates on me.

I am what you might call a vibe coder. I occasionally do some data analysis in Python for work, but most of my exposure to coding comes from hobby projects I do in my own time. Using Cursor, I frequently find myself running out of free credits. After which point, the tool slows down so much that it becomes unusable.

I recently switched to VS Code, because I heard about Gemini Code Assist being free for personal projects, but not available on Cursor. However, at some point in my VS Code journey, I pasted a bit of code into my ChatGPT desktop app to ask it for help, and I realised that ChatGPT was able to read from the file. Upon further investigation, I realised that there is an integration that enables the desktop ChatGPT app to read open files in VS Code. So I paste error messages or questions into ChatGPT, and use that to help me get over problems.

This is not as fully featured as Cursor or Copilot. But for a hobbyist like me, it does the job. As someone learning to code, it is kind of helpful to use a tool which does not edit my code directly. It encourages me to figure things out for myself that bit more. And models available on ChatGPT Plus perform better on coding tasks than the free LLM (large language model, another name for the type of model ChatGPT is) options that users fall back on when they run out of free credits.

2. Image editor and creator

Since I moved house a few months ago, I have spent a lot of time deciding what I want it to look like and trying to explain my vision to builders. My graphic design skills are not what they used to be. Online visualisation tools from suppliers are pretty limited. So whilst everyone else was creating photos of themselves in the style of Spirited Away, I was using ChatGPT’s image editing functionality to help me figure out how to design my house.

Here is an image of my future kitchen generated by my kitchen designer at Howdens.

I wanted to try out some different tile combinations on the walls. The tool the Howdens designer was using would not let her edit the walls. The below was the best I could get out of the Topps Tiles visualiser.

*The best I could do in the Topps Tiles visualiser*

I tried out lots of tile colours and sizes, but eventually settled on this design. Getting the tiles to go full height on the back wall, two tiles high on the side wall, and up the sides of the peninsula took a little bit of prompting to achieve. But this is way more advanced than what other online tools were able to achieve, and a lot cheaper/quicker than working with a professional designer.

High fidelity visualisations like this one have helped me make big design decisions with confidence that the end product will look as good as it looks in my imagination. It is also helped me to minimise room for misunderstandings with my builder.

I am a big user of the ChatGPT app on Mac. But I recently discovered the browser version allows you to specify which parts of images need editing via the UI. This can be handy when ChatGPT decides to change things you don’t want it to (which it often does, even with this feature).

House designs aside, other use cases include:

Checking if my tattoo ideas will look good on me (answer: no they don’t. Glad I figured that out before putting needle to skin)
Creating visualisations for work presentations and blog posts
Explaining to suppliers on Etsy what I want a customised product to look like
Imagining what our future family might look like (answer: her hair & eye colour unsurprisingly dominate mine, but the most surprising thing seems to be how parenthood has changed our faces and made me shorter)

*Prompt: Create a realistic image of a family. The two people in the photo as parents. With their 2 children – boy and girl. Blend features from both parents.*

Update: check out my October 2025 post on image editing with Google AI Pro for a more recent take on image editing

3. Real-time meeting assistant

There is a wealth of good information on the internet in places like Stack Overflow and Reddit. But usually these resources aim to answer a question similar to mine, rather than the exact question I am asking.

As a product manager in a startup, I often find myself trying to follow along in very technical conversations. Examples include meetings with legal experts about law & policy taxonomy or workshops with the engineering team planning a new API. Trying to Google these topics as I go through meetings can get me to the information I am looking for too slow, and lead to me getting lost in the conversation. I am not afraid to put my hand up and ask stupid questions, but it is nice not to have to do that too often.

One thing I have been doing more recently is kicking off a ChatGPT conversation when I know things are getting too technical for me. I start by explaining the type of conversation I am having, and asking it to provide quick, simple answers for me to answer my questions when I have them. I can get fast answers to questions like “what is model context protocol” and “if I use a custom font, what percentage of users might have to see fallback fonts by channel”. I can learn in real time, keep up with the conversation and make a meaningful contribution to the meeting.

4. Teacher

Teaching in general is an area in which I think LLMs excel. If I read a line in a book that I don’t understand, I like to paste that content into ChatGPT and ask it to explain. More often than not, after a few exchanges, it can help me figure out what the author was trying to say.

As a product manager, the only words I say at work more often than “Not yet” are “What I heard you say was”. Playing back your understanding to others is one of the best ways to ensure two people understand each other. Speaking or writing things in my own words is how I learn things. It is a big part of why I keep this blog going.

So I often like to try to explain things to ChatGPT and see how it picks apart my explanations. This helps me cement my learning and saves my team from having to listen to me speak quite so much.

5. Product comparer

Moving house means that I often have to choose between products in domains that I really do not understand. In years gone by, I would have done this by reading comparisons that other people have written. However, you need to read a lot of sources to mitigate the risk of being over-influenced by a reviewer who is trying to sell you something. I also often find myself with weirdly specific criteria that other people haven’t included in their reviews. Things like “patio tiles which don’t stain when cats are sick on them”.

Some comparisons I have done recently include:

How good are Rehau vs Liniar windows
Compare Labradors and Golden Retrievers. Which are smaller and easier to train
Compare composite front door from Endurance and DirectDoors. Give each a rating for quality, security, and durability
Best earbuds for phone calls (I am struggling to find earbuds where my parents won’t complain about the background noise on calls!)

As most LLMs are trained on the content of the internet and can repeat patterns found in bodies of text, I think these are the types of questions that they are naturally suited to. The answers given should be a quick aggregation of the type of content that exists on the internet about this topic, which is good enough for me.

I am a big fan of asking ChatGPT to respond with the answer in a table format, defining the rows and columns I want it to include, and asking it to score things out of 10. This is the way I like to consume information. Being able to get most content into that format is super helpful.

For high-stakes decisions, I don’t rely on ChatGPT alone and seek advice from a person who knows what they are talking about. But it does give me the information I need to participate in the conversation.

6. Cost estimator

A friend is buying his first home and wanted to make an offer on a property. He asked me for my thoughts on how much he should offer. So, rather than scouring sale history on Zoopla and checking out what the neighbourhood was like on Google Street View, I uploaded the advert of the property and asked it to estimate the true market value.

ChatGPT came back with all sorts of data on recent price trends in the area and average prices of homes like that one, and sought to give an estimate factoring in lots of the nuances about this particular property (e.g. planning permission granted for expansion). The estimated market value it came back with gave us a good idea of the ballpark price to aim for, but all the assumptions it made when giving the estimate gave us useful information to go on. That said, he was outbid on this property. Perhaps the eventual buyer did not have the benefit of ChatGPTs wisdom on the matter!

I have had more success in getting ChatGPT’s help to estimate other work. For example, it was spot on with its estimates of the relative cost of replacing a traditional boiler like for like vs with a combi boiler vs a combi boiler and immersion heater. It was also very accurate in estimating the costs of laminate vs LVT flooring, painting rooms and the labour cost for installing different types of tiles. When I have got high costs back from suppliers, it has helped me figure out when to keep shopping around vs when to recognise that I have a good deal.

Final thoughts

ChatGPT is not the best tool for every task. Claude is the best for coding, and Perplexity is a joy to use for web search. However, none of the alternatives do all the things that ChatGPT does.

Personally, there is huge value in having all my LLM chats in one place. I frequently find myself using the search bar in ChatGPT as a way of finding useful information from previous conversations. Not having this data fragmented across different LLMs is useful. And it is great for OpenAI too, as whilst they might be losing money on my account right now, the barriers for me personally to switch away from them are increasing all the time. And as the cost of LLMs continues to come down exponentially year by year, there is huge value in being the platform where users go with their questions about things. Ask Google!

So, as someone who does not want to pay for more than one AI product and likes the convenience of having a one-stop shop, it seems like the obvious choice for me right now.