Ask HN: What are your thoughts on ChatGPT as a professional?

I use ChatGPT everyday and I am sure it is a great, novel, and revolutionary tool. I said I am sure because I can measure how ChatGPT inproves my daily work. I don't use it for software development because I am in a management role now.

The first insight is that an article that I need to publish could be proofread immediately while before I used an incredible professional content editor that could take hours for reviewing and improving the article. The editor continues to work for us though ;-). In general, the ChatGPT answers should not be copy and pasted but be merged with your content.

Another insight is that ChatGPT is gradually replacing or being a complement to Google Search. Google Search is terrible nowadays and simple questions in ChatGPT are a good way to start a search in a domain that you are not expert at. It needs a dialectic approach but works.

I would say garbage-in / garbage-out: if you interact with original questions the tool could be more insightful but be always critical of the output.

It's really still too early to say. Everyone has widely different opinions about it. You'll find plenty of people advocating for it and plenty against it. I say that if you're able to explain it to people in a similar way to how you've explained here, most will be understanding.

Whenever someone says this, I always wonder whether we're talking about the same tool. GPT-3.5 scores at the bottom 10% in a lot of tasks where GPT-4 scores in the top 10%.

Use it. It's going to sometimes accelerate your understanding hugely because you can interrogate it about a new area. It's also going to lie to you, quite often, and give you rubbish code / suggestions. Learn to figure out where it's good and where it's rubbish.

Ask it to explain every line of something, after the fact. Ask it for better ways of doing things. Ask it how you can make code more robust, what and how you can test it. Be better than your peers at using it. The world will only increase usage of this new thing so why not just be really good at it.

In the grand scheme of things it's about the value that you add, and some of that will be getting into a new problem fast and sometimes it'll be your understanding of fundamentals. Do both, use whatever tools you need. Buy books, read open source code, read blogs, use AI.

I use ChatGPT all the time at work.

I find it particularly useful when I'm responding to a client with something technical. ChatGPT can sharpen up the message, clarify points in a client-friendly way, and hit the right tone.

Great for throwing around ideas and getting some feedback before diving into the code too.

I find it's easy to go wrong if you're too trusting of the output though. For important questions, I'll get some initial guidance from ChatGPT to refine my research rather than outright accept any answer it gives.