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Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

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Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#581

Post by gwd »

jgwil2 wrote: post #549
hughesjj wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% this. It's also game changing for learning a new language (of any type, not just programming), any of the boring parts of software engineering like most programming tasks (it's like a personal intern -- sure you have to check their work and the quality is all over the place but still, dang I love it), and even a bit of therapy. At worst/minimum, It's the ultimate rubber duck. (To be clear, I'm exclusively using…

Can you elaborate on how you've used it for natural language learning?

I'm studying Chinese. If I run across a sentence whose grammar I can't parse, I paste it in and say, "Can you explain this sentence?" It will usually break it down, phrase by phrase, explaining what each thing means and how it fits within the whole. If it doesn't, you can ask "Can you break it down in more detail?" If there's a specific word you don't understand, you can say "What is the word X doing in this sentence?"

You have to watch it, because it does hallucinate (at least, GPT-3.5; I'm using the API and haven't been given access to GPT-4 yet). In one instance, it said that a series of characters meant X in Chinese, when in fact I happened to know it was just a transliteration of a different language, and not in Chinese at all. But it's still helpful enough to be worth using.

You can also ask it to give you example sentences with a specific word; and I've had some success asking it to generate sentences in which then word is used in the same way, or with the same grammar structure.

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#582

Post by MattyRad »

Volrath89 wrote: post #244
Marcan wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for your well written response. I found it informative as I'm also currently exploring ways to leverage ChatGPT in my daily workflow. I also found it interesting that your answer kind of mirrors the writing style of ChatGPT, especially at the end there. I'm not saying you used it to write that response by the way, just that it may become more and more common for people to adopt this style the more ChatGPT's…

I suppose it was part of the "joke", but YOUR answer is the one written in ChatGPT style, not OP. I was thinking that maybe in the near future it will be "better" to write with a couple of mistakes here and there just to prove your humanity. Like the common "loose" instead of "lose" mistake, it will be like a stamp proving that you are a human writing.

Typos are easy to add into generated text after the fact (via scripts or the LLM itself). Perhaps instead of typos, you could use colorful language:

Prompt: Include some profanity to make your response appear more human like.

Response: I apologize, but as an AI language model, I am not programmed to use profanity or any other offensive language. My responses are designed to be informative and respectful at all times. Is there anything else I can assist you with?

Fucking goddamn machine won't do what it's told ;)

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#583

Post by plorkyeran »

imiric wrote: post #286
nibbleshifter wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use them either. I've played around with ChatGPT and Copilot a little, and found that they often are subtly, but very confidently wrong in their output when asked to perform a programming task. Sure you could spend ages refining the prompt etc, but its going to be faster to just write the fucking code yourself in the first place most of the time. Then there's the privacy/security concerns...

I really doubt it would be faster to write code manually, even with the state of AI tools today. Even with very sophisticated keyboard macros and traditional autocompletion, someone using GPT would outperform anyone who doesn't. Think of the amount of boilerplate and tests you write, and tedious API documentation lookups you do daily; that all goes away with GPT. The amount of work to double check whether the generat…

If you eliminated 100% of my code typing time with perfect effectiveness I think that'd make me maybe 10% or 20% more productive? Turning ideas of what the code should be doing into code just isn't a bottleneck for me in the first place. Are there people who just add net 1000 lines of code to whatever they're working on every single day or something?

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#584

Post by xkcd1963 »

okr wrote: post #237
Thorentis wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This could mean the future goes one of the two ways. Engineers get lazy and converge on using only programming languages which AIs understand or have been trained on, or we forget about this waste of time and work on more important problems to solve in society other than the lack of an AI to be our crutch. Sadly, I think the former is more likely.

Programmers are per se lazy, at least that is, what i always thought, that it is mostly about automation. With spending little time on survival, we get the time to work on more important problems. Whatever those are. It is not an either or, that is what i try to say! :)

Oh yeah social media is such a problem solver

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#585

Post by boredtofears »

toomanyrichies wrote: post #520

I’m using it as a technical editor for a book I’m writing on bash for beginner programmers. Compiling this book from scratch is a one-man operation; I don’t have the budget or time to hire a technically-competent bash programmer who is also willing to act as a proofreader and editor. Instead, I plug in certain paragraphs and ask “Does the following paragraph about file descriptors / environment vs. shell variables /…

> But I can ask ChatGPT that same question, and get a correction in my understanding without the loss of those sweet, sweet internet points.

How do you ever know when the correction it makes is wrong?

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#586

Post by toss1 »

f6v wrote: post #525
toss1 wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It / OpenAi are not "deciding what is good and bad for us", it is deciding what services they want to provide or not provide. Your pontificating is doing more "deciding what is good and bad for us" (grousing about it's inability to identify the pornstar you're horny for today & dressing it up as some kind of moral high ground) than it is. There are plenty of open source LLM and "AI" models or research to build your o…

It seems like you think you have a moral high ground. Being horny for pornstar isn’t inherently bad.

I didn't say it was bad (and yes, I was including an inference, not entirely unfounded).

What IS bad is that the commenter is acting as if (s)he has a somehow superior moral position when a product clearly not designed for the purpose (s)he wants is not actually fit for his/her purpose.

As if (s)he is the final arbiter of what other products should include as capabilities, never mind that these are capabilities that they not only do not advertise, but specifically provide notice that they do NOT do.

If OpenAi advertised these capabilities and it failed, I'd be 100% with him/her. But the situation is the opposite, and the moralistic complaint is annoying political noise.

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#587

Post by HDMI_Cable »

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #572
barbarr wrote: post #40

For coding, I've been using it like Stack Overflow. It really decreases my barrier to doing work because I can ask lazy follow-up questions. For example, I might start out by asking it a question about a problem with Pandas like "How do I select rows of a dataframe where a column of lists of strings contains a string?". After that, GPT realizes I'm talking about Pandas, and I'm allowed to ask lazy prompts like "how d…

> "How do I select rows of a dataframe where a column of lists of strings contains a string?" Literally just googled that and the first result: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53342715/pandas-datafram... You're not using it like Stack Overflow. It's actually regurgitating Stack Overflow, except with errors hallucinated in.

Even with that caveat, using GPT in this way is still useful. The amount of time spent to simply ask GPT-4 is a lot lower than to search StackOverflow, and while this problem is so basic that the first result often works, once one gets into complex problems that massively benefit from input context, I think GPT-4 would save massive amounts of time.

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#588

Post by roflyear »

sd9 wrote: post #386
roflyear wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't make stuff up. There is no indication that will happen.

This seems very plausible to me. The context window improved a lot between GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, and OpenAI clearly see value in increasing it further.

Explain how it improved. Yes, it has improved accuracy (test taking) but it still gets stuck in the same loops over and over:

"response has issue A" -> point out issue A to GPT "response has issue B" -> point out issue B to GPT

GPT replies with the response that had issue A ...

This is not a tool that is going to be good at performing generic tasks. It just isn't.

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#589

Post by roflyear »

throwthrowuknow wrote: post #459
roflyear wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't make stuff up. There is no indication that will happen.

GPT-4 has a model capable of using around 50 pages of written text worth of tokens (32,000) not sure exactly how many lines of code that translates to but it’s a lot. GPT-3 can use 4k so that’s a huge increase, the next version could be even larger and there are other ML techniques that allow for massive context lengths. Copilot already does a good job of refactoring code and knows enough about your code base to use…

It isn't anywhere near being able to diagnose anything more than off-by-one and other common errors.

Identifying hose problems will bring a LOT of value - but it isn't going to program and do general problem solving for you! It just has no signs of being able to do that.

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#590

Post by roflyear »

mlboss wrote: post #500
roflyear wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't make stuff up. There is no indication that will happen.

Yesterday’s Steve Yegge post talks about it. You can provide text as context but you can also provide a dense representation in the form of text embeddings that capture the context. Today you can manually do it by something like LangChain but in future it will be part of our text editors.

Yes it will be able to give amazing feedback to us as devs and quickly identify common problems (that I still make all the time, even after developing for a decade!) which will bring a ton of value to programmers.

But, it will be a tool - it won't be something that will solve general problems for you. It won't make an average programmer a great programmer.

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