Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

641–650 of 752 posts

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

#641

Post by kaveh_h »

It’s been an amazoing productivity booster. Both in terms of reasoning capability and how it improves my context switching ability from one language and set of problems to another.

I’ve used it as a much smarter SO and Google for understanding existing code and getting suggestion how to solve some low-level problems in code as I’ve mainly working on fixing a lot of bugs (not my own code) and it’s in a programming language and libraries that I’ve got almost no previous experience in. It’s not always accurate but the amazing thing is that it’s somewhat steerable, but you need to have enough experience and understanding to detect subtle errors.

I’m only feeding it small snippets of code and sometimes we only chat about toy examples that are related to what I work on so I don’t have any major concerns about data leaks or hacks.

I’ve also tested it’s ability to do BDD, TDD, CI/CD and some more esoteric things such as formal verification with TLA+. My experience have been it works pretty good for any thing which have good amount of examples and related content. It’s actually a very good tool for learning as you can query it for issues you’re having while learning.

The only issue is it’s not up to date for leading edge stuff because of it’s cutoff time.

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

#642

Post by l8rlump »

I have a chat always accessible with the below prompt to help me learn another language:

Can we use this chat to translate between English and xyz? If I enter an English word or phrase, please translate it to xyz. If I enter a word or phrase in xyz, please translate it to English. If my spelling is incorrect, please attempt to correct it, offer your suggested spelling, and then proceed to translate.

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

#643

Post by toastal »

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…

I'm a bit concerned about this as previously we'd build communities in chat but now the chat is just with the bot. Not wasting folks' time is great, but you'll miss out on the social parts by not asking around the IRC, Matrix room, or MUC.

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

#644

Post by kusha »

I've used it for the following concrete tasks:

- Github CI pipeline for running tests on a pet project. To the best of my knowledge it was 100% successful with no edits needed, but it was stupid simple.

- Starting place for Jest tests on the same pet project. It didn't give me 100% correct suggestions, but it greatly reduced the mental barrier of using a new technology and writing tests with mocks in an unfamiliar language (typescript)

- Determining how hot a mosfet will get under a certain voltage/amperage with no electrical understanding. I asked for many different mosfets and it got the data sheet numbers frequently incorrect. Super helpful going from 0 to figuring how what to look for on a data sheet and plugging those numbers into to formulas to determine how hot different mosfets would get. (context, this was for a 3d printer)

- Writing a Fresh Prince of Bel Air opening rap scene parody for a board game. I would give it the ideas, it would write the lyrics. Eventually I strung together a bunch of it's lyrics and asked it to make it better. It did by making stuff rhyme better. I had to shorten and change some lyrics to fit to the beat. Way easier than writing it from scratch.

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

#646

Post by exolymph »

pragmatick wrote: post #152
exolymph wrote: post #129

I'm a writer (copy, social, all-purpose) at a startup. I've been using GPT4 via Lex.page to generate crappy first drafts which I then improve and expand. It can speed up the process quite a bit, but needs handholding and someone to add in personality.

What's lex.page? The landing page doesn't give any information, just requires me to login using Google.

Similar to Google Docs but with GPT4 (previously 3 and 3.5) built in.

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

#647

Post by dharmab »

re-thc wrote: post #640
dharmab wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Automobile were faster or equivalent to horses (even early 1s). The automobile was invented in 1885, but didn't replace the horse until the 1910s.

For the same reasons or different 1s? Could be cost, accessibility and others.

Largely because of infrastructure. You could get animal feed in places you couldn't get gasoline and oil. And horses don't need smooth roads.

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

#648

Post by dgunay »

I've so far used successfully it for:

  - Larger, more annoying reformatting tasks when Copilot isn't cutting it. Stuff like turning Go's variable dumps into JSON. I'm too lazy to write a tool to do it really.
  - I had it take a small legacy interface and wrap it in a nicer one. Passed a handwritten test suite with flying colors.
  - Coming up with arcane sed, jq, cut, etc. commands. Generally it is great at getting me 90-100% of the way to a solution in query/command languages that I just don't have a compelling reason to learn deeply.
It has come up short for me when:

  - I asked it for advice on architecting a new service, and it mostly ignored my requirements. It just looooves suggesting Kafka, Spark, etc for any task.
  - Tried to use GPT-4 to make a rather large rewrite of something into Rust, and it couldn't do it (even its context window was too small). Compressing the code did not help; it elided all useful parts of the code since it had no "budget" left.

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

#649

Post by thefz »

hsjqllzlfkf wrote: post #345
thefz wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same! Never even opened ChatGPT page nor used an AI bot.

Good for you! If you don't want to learn new tools, you shouldn't.

Tools? Nah. I would not trust that stuff for anything, not even a recipe on how to make plain bread.

A good old Google search followed by reasoning on what you have found is still the most valuable tool. Learn to sift through information, filter, ingest.

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

#650

Post by dr_dshiv »

gabrieledarrigo wrote: post #477
chrbr wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, and for things like cognitive behavioral therapy, where the "rules" are well-known and well-represented in its training corpus, it's amazing.

Guys, you are really crazy. Please find a real therapist with experience.

In the context of mental health, telling people they are crazy and they need a real therapist, is generally a poor word choice, at least.
Post reply on HN