I know I rag on AI. But I’ve always said it has its uses, limited as they may be (at least in my opinion). But yesterday, I found a perfect use for it.

I had to convert the number of seconds (of a video runtime) into a string that would give the user a more human-readable view of the number of hours, minutes, and seconds for said runtime. In other words, in this format: hh:mm:ss.

Could I have written this utility method? Of course I can.

Did I want to? Not even a little bit.

Did it save me 5-10 minutes? Absolutely.

I fired up ChatGPT and wrote: using C# write me a method that takes a number of seconds and turns it into a string representation of hours, minutes, and seconds.

In 5 seconds, I had the several lines to accomplish it. Done.

That’s what AI should be doing for us. It’s a tool to be used. Not to replace.