And many people tried it a year ago and wrote it off as useless after trying to get results with basic one-shot prompting.

Those people, likely, will never change their opinion.

And that’s fine, because they won’t get the huge benefits that come from spending time learning how to use the tool properly.

Agreed. If one compares ChatGPT to, say, the Cline IDE plugin backed by Claude 3.7, they might well be blown away by how far behind ChatGPT seems. A lot of the difference has to do with prompting, for sure -- Cline helps there by generating prompts from your IDE and project context automatically.

Every once in a while I send a query off to ChatGPT and I'm often disappointed and jam on the "this was hallucinated" feedback button (or whatever it is called). I have better luck with Claude's chat interface but nowhere near the quality of response that I get with Cline driving.

You should try Claude Code. I was pretty impressed the first time I tried it. Go in with a specific task in mind