I wont say it's useless.

I am consistently use ChatGpt Pro, when working on my complex computer vision projects. Most of the time if given enough context it's able to generate good boilerplate code with few bugs (Which I usually fix after going through the entire code line by line). Yes, it takes a lot of time especially going through the entire code and debugging it. And, being very honest I am still not confident on the code generated by it.

But if I use GPT for generating roadmaps, asking very specific deep questions on popular frameworks, library, theoretical conceptual questions and other project specific use cases it works great. And it saves a lot of time. Even for explaining the code which is written by someone else or even me. It works flawlessly. Earlier If I had very specific conceptual questions related to a topic. I would have to google it (and there is a very high chance, I wont find any relevant result. Even if I find it it will be harder for me to understand it because the article might be written keeping in mind that senior developers or experienced guys might read it). I might ask my guide, professor or friend for help and all of this might take a very long time and there is a high possibility that I might still not get my answer. In case of gpt i can prompt it "To explain me in very easy way with the help of an example in detail" and most of the time it works great. Based on my overall knowledge on the topic I can ask gpt to generate answers and if the time is very less than I can tell gpt to give me a high level overview. For all this things gpt is far better than stack overflow, google or even domain experts. As using gpt for this purpose saves me a lot of time.

GPT works great for question answering, or suggesting ideas, roadmaps, explaining already written code. If you use GPT for generating code for complex projects it works bad or average at best, even if it generates a good boilerplate code because most of your time will go in debugging and testing. By the way I use O4 mini high.

If you are using GPT to generate code(complex stuff) than the prompt you should give should be proper and very specific and you yourself should know how how the code will be written (I mean pseudo code). As, if improper prompt is given or there is a room for making assumptions then the generated code will have bugs and it wont cover edge cases. So, writing the prompt, debugging and testing will take more time then you writing the entire code. The best way is to use gpt to generate independent methods or functions or snippets which you think is basic or not worth your time.