There's a couple uses cases (beyond the obvious) that I like with the chatbots 1. Brainstorming building something. Tell it what you're working on, add a paragraph or two of how you might build it, and ask it to give you pros and cons and ways to improve. Especially if it's mostly a well-trod design it can be helpful. 2. Treating it like a coach - tell it what you've done and need to get done, include any feedback yo…
Ask HN: What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you?
61–70 of 108 posts
Re: Ask HN: What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you?
#62Our entire history we’ve adapted technology to our requirements. Now some people believe that adapting our workflows to make use of “technology” is revolutionary.
This is not remotely true. We've been adapting our workflow to technology since forever.
Re: Ask HN: What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you?
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I started with BASICA and GWBASIC in the 80s, and though I've had some diversions, I would say there haven't been many days since where I haven't thought about solving problems with code. I still don't feel particularly qualified to answer, but I guess I probably am. > Are all of these posts just astroturfed?! I ask that sincerely. This is amusing to me - since GPT 4 or so, I've been wondering if the real fake grass…
>> Are all of these posts just astroturfed?! I ask that sincerely. >This is amusing to me - since GPT 4 or so, I've been wondering if the real fake grass is actually folks saying this shit is useless. Heh. If you really wanna conspiracy theory it, if you wanted positive marketing copy to sepl people on using an LLM, would you just use plain ChatGPT, or, because you're in the industry, would you post ernest-sounding a…
Re: Ask HN: What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you?
#64They're trained on communicative text and questions. They handle these extra well. Give it proper specs. I bought a whiteboard to take photos to give it.
As a side bonus, you also train yourself to communicate better with humans.
[1] https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/test-and-evaluate/strengt...
Re: Ask HN: What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you?
#65I’m exhausted by these types of posts. I am a developer with >25 of professional experience. I am unable to get these things to do anything useful. I’ve tried: different models, limiting my scope, breaking it down to small tasks, prompt “engineering”; and am still getting less than useless results. I say less than useless, because I will then additionally waste time debugging or slamming my head against the wall the…
Re: Ask HN: What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you?
#66I'm parsing 3000 pdfs a month straight into our system which were all previously manually entered. Total game changer.
Re: Ask HN: What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you?
#67I’m exhausted by these types of posts. I am a developer with >25 of professional experience. I am unable to get these things to do anything useful. I’ve tried: different models, limiting my scope, breaking it down to small tasks, prompt “engineering”; and am still getting less than useless results. I say less than useless, because I will then additionally waste time debugging or slamming my head against the wall the…
Start small and you might see the value. I find ai useless to produce code for me. But if I'm stuck on naming a variable or a complex object it's a great brainstorming tool. Almost like a very complex thesaurus. And if I need to write a shell script that's good enough for a single one-off job, well, shell script is far from my native programming language, so it'll do a better job than I will
Re: Ask HN: What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you?
#68Im currently using the ChatBox desktop app which I quite like. You can setup as many chats as you want with different providers (openai, claude, google etc) and different custom instructions. I can move between different providers for a 2nd opinion and also easily setup different chats for specific tasks like content writer, developer, product manager and so on. https://chatboxai.app/en
> I can move between different providers for a 2nd opinion Do you see big differences in general or is it more a product of different system prompts?
Re: Ask HN: What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you?
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I am a developer with >25 of professional experience. I am unable to get these things to do anything useful. I am a developer with >25 of professional experience. I was able to do useful things with these tools from day one of trying. This puzzles me so much every time reading such. Either I am more stupid than average and I just think the results are more useful then I can come up with, or maybe I have a knack for…
> or are you smarter than those results? “Smarter than” are your words. I’ve just yet to get any real utility from them. > When I read such comments I ask myself, do you even use stackoverflow I find this a strange comparison. I’ve yet to see people replacing employees with “stack overflow” or M$FT shoe horning “stack overflow” into their flagship product or former NSA members joining the board of “stack overflow” or…
I have however found it to be very helpful, completely replacing usage of StackOverflow for instance. Instead of googling for your problem, ask AI and provide very specific information like version numbers of libraries, etc. and it usually comes back with something helpful.
All those headlines and nonsense, like most content online these days it looks like marketing content, not journalism. AI tools are helpful and in some ways feel like an evolution of search engine technology from ~25 years ago. Treat its output like a junior developer or intern. It does require some effort, like coaching a junior dev or intern. You can also ask it stupid questions, things like tech you haven't worked on in a while but you "should know". Its helpful to get back up to speed on things like that.
Re: Ask HN: What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you?
#70Breaking down code into smaller files (<200 lines of code), and then ONLY feeding the relevant files into the LLM helps a lot to improve the quality of code output and saves tokens.