ChatGPT Is Replacing the Dumbest Part of Search

The first move on every technical problem is the same.

Open too many tabs. Search the error. Click the Stack Overflow thread that is almost right, which is another way of saying useless. Skim four pages. Open three more tabs. Assemble enough fragments to have one useful thought. Start thinking.

That stretch is not engineering. It is TAX.

What ChatGPT is doing right now is replacing it. Not the thinking. Not the judgment. Not the knowing-when-it-is-wrong part, which you still have to do and always will. The orientation layer. The slow crawl from "I know this is solvable" to "I finally have enough context to start."

That is a smaller claim than what you keep reading. It is also correct.

Describe the problem in plain language. Get a synthesized starting point back instead of assembling one from six half-relevant tabs. The model handles the first-pass orientation. You handle whether it is right.

I still verify everything. The model is not always right, and confident-and-wrong is its worst combination. What changed is how fast I get from problem to thinking.

The first 20 minutes of every technical problem used to be slow and wasteful.

Now they are not.

That is the whole improvement. Nothing revolutionary. Not some engineering replacement. Just consistently faster entry into the part where judgment matters.

And once something starts giving you back that time consistently, it stops feeling optional pretty fast.