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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?

#681

Post by sd9 »

roflyear wrote: post #678
sd9 wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said that the context window improved. I mean that it is larger. GPT-3.5 is 4k tokens, GPT-4 is 8k tokens (standard) or 32k tokens (only API access atm). This is the number of tokens that GPT-X can take into account when producing a response. Specifically, I was using this to support the statement "In very near future your IDE will send the whole codebase as context to LLMs." I'm not talking about loops or accuracy…

It's true, but there is no indication that GPT can explain larger concepts for you, and negative indication it will be able to do it accurately. It can't even explain small code to me unless it is something that it has been trained on. Often it gets even simple things wrong, either obviously, or worse, subtly wrong.

I agree that this is the part that needs more work, and is most uncertain. Increasing context windows seems like a fairly straightforward computational challenge (albeit potentially expensive). On the other hand, whether or not we can scale current models towards "true understanding" (or similar), is a total unknown atm.

I still think we will get useful things from scaling up current models though. I've already got a lot of value out of Copilot, for instance, and I'm looking forward to the next version based on GPT-4. Recently, I've been using the GPT-3 Copilot to write a lot of pandas/matplotlib code, which is fairly straightforward and repetitive, but as mainly a Java developer, I just don't have the APIs at my fingertips. Copilot helps a lot with this sort of thing.

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

#682

Post by 93po »

devstein wrote: post #670
93po wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to sign up but the only option is to sign in with Google which I don't want to do. Can I not just give you my email address?

Right now the app only supports Gmail, so I've limited login to only Google. I'm working on changing this soon! What email provider do you use?

Fastmail with my own domain

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

#683

Post by fanagra32 »

fooker wrote: post #471
fanagra32 wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you will have no idea whether the solution it presents to you is idiomatic or recommended or contains some common critical flaw or is hopelessly outdated. How can you find out? Back to alt-tabbing to the browser. Sure it may take a bit more time to get going, but then you'll get it right the first time and learn something along the way. Your copilot example is just another iteration of copy-and-paste some random…

You have no idea if the alternative code you would have written would have been idiomatic or had some critical flaw. We have 50+ years of software engineering wisdom to deal with these issues. Testing, Fuzzing, version control, code reviews, the whole gauntlet.

> You have no idea if the alternative code you would have written would have been idiomatic or had some critical flaw.

But I have a feeling for both, which is one of the key components of the skill in our trade.

For idionmatic code, I know the degree to which I'm following how things "should" be done or are "usually" done in a given language. If I'm uncertain, I know that. GPT won't tell me this. Worse, it will confidently claim things, possibly even if presented with evidence to the contrary.

For critical flaws, I know the "dark corners" of the code. Cases which were not obvious to handle or required some trick, etc. I'll test those specifically. With GPTs code, I have no idea what the critical cases are. I can read the code and can try to guess. But it's like outsourcing writing tests to a QA department. Never donna be as effective as the original author of the code. And if I can't trust GPT to write correct code, I can't trust it to write a good test for the code. So, neither the original author of the code (GPT) nor somebody external (me) will be able to test the result properly

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

#684

Post by fanagra32 »

throwaway675309 wrote: post #568
fanagra32 wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you will have no idea whether the solution it presents to you is idiomatic or recommended or contains some common critical flaw or is hopelessly outdated. How can you find out? Back to alt-tabbing to the browser. Sure it may take a bit more time to get going, but then you'll get it right the first time and learn something along the way. Your copilot example is just another iteration of copy-and-paste some random…

"Back to alt-tabbing to the browser." Yes because tutorial info on some rando's webpage is never out of date. /s

It is. I can see that it was written in 2003 and discard it. GPT won't tell me if its answer is based on an ancient lib version.

Essentially, GPT is that rando's webpage but with the metadata stripped away that allowed me to make judgement calls about its trustworthyness. No author, no time, no style to see if somebody is trolling.

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

#685

Post by sideshowb »

sys_64738 wrote: post #359
hermannj314 wrote: post #349

I have a few conversations going. My most productive is a therapy session with ChatGPT as therapist. I told it my values, my short term goals, and some areas in my life where I'd like to have more focus and areas where I would like to spend less time. Some days we are retrospective and some days we are planning. My therapist gets me back on track, never judges, and has lots of motivational ideas for me. All aligned w…

I still use Eliza as my therapist.

That's interesting. Can you tell me more about how you still use Eliza as your therapist? ;-)

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

#686

Post by hohg »

wussboy wrote: post #521
VoodooJuJu wrote: post #330

Useful things: - As a thesaurus - What's the name of that "thing" that does "something" - kind of like fuzzy matching - A starting point for writing particular functions. For example, I wanted a certain string-manipulation function written in C, and it gave me a decent skeleton. However they're almost always very inefficient, so I have to optimize them. Things I've tried, that others seem to be blown away by, that I…

This is the kind of response that truly leaves me underwhelmed with Chat GPT. A thesaurus? A different kind of search engine? No thanks. I think Chat GPT would be useful to raise an almost infinite number of accusations against your enemies on social media, muddying the water with a deluge of garbage and poisoning every conceivable well with unlimited zeal. Are your societal purposes remotely at odds with my own? I'l…

[dead]

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

#687

Post by circuit10 »

nibbleshifter wrote: post #267
imiric wrote: post #242

I might be in the minority here, but I'm not using any AI tools so far, probably to my detriment. I don't trust it with my data, and won't rely on such tools until I can self-host them, and they can be entirely offline. There is some progress in this space, but they're not great yet, and I don't have the resources to run them. I'm hoping that the requirements will go down, or I might just host it on a cloud provider.…

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...

Then use it as autocomplete to write things you were going to put anyway but faster, it will still speed things up

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

#688

Post by ElCapitanMarkla »

hughesjj wrote: post #188
qrybam wrote: post #182

I’ve been actively using it and it’s become my go-to in a lot of cases - Google is more for verification when I smell something off or if it doesn’t have up to date information. Here are some examples: • reviewing contract changes, explaining hard to parse legalese • advice on accounting/tax when billing international clients • visa application • boilerplate django code • learnt all about smtp relays, and requirement…

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…

Learning a new language is a really cool use case. Especially when it gets to the point where you can talk with it and it corrects pronunciation, etc. even just the practise of random conversation is a cool idea.

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

#689

Post by ElCapitanMarkla »

themodelplumber wrote: post #110
jmann99999 wrote: post #15

Generally rewriting emails for clarity... but I found another neat use of GPT-4. For public APIs, I ask to make sure its aware of the api. Then I ask for endpoints. I find the endpoint I want. Then I ask it to code a request to the endpoint in language X (Ruby, Python, Elixir). It then gives me a starting point to jump off from. Thirty seconds of prompt writing saves me about 20 minutes of getting setup. Yes, I have…

You reminded me: I discovered that ChatGPT had invented an API for me. Has that happened to you yet? Since it went to the trouble of writing code for the API as well, I contacted the API developers to follow up about the topic. The code given was kind of a hand-wave anyway so I'd need to polish it up. The developers were surprised to hear they had an API. In truth, there was no such thing. I then found myself in one…

Yeah I was coding up a fairly complicated payment form for a Stripe like processor the other day. I thought I’d give chatgpt a go and it confidently gave me the example code I needed and told me how to use it, etc. I was blown away until about 30 seconds later when I realised it was all complete bull crap. It was quite bizarre because this company didn’t really have any public docs out from when chatgpt supposedly harvested it’s data until, but it knew about the company and knew a couple of funny keywords this company uses in its form, so it was almost believable.

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

#690

Post by ElCapitanMarkla »

ElCapitanMarkla wrote: post #689
themodelplumber wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You reminded me: I discovered that ChatGPT had invented an API for me. Has that happened to you yet? Since it went to the trouble of writing code for the API as well, I contacted the API developers to follow up about the topic. The code given was kind of a hand-wave anyway so I'd need to polish it up. The developers were surprised to hear they had an API. In truth, there was no such thing. I then found myself in one…

Yeah I was coding up a fairly complicated payment form for a Stripe like processor the other day. I thought I’d give chatgpt a go and it confidently gave me the example code I needed and told me how to use it, etc. I was blown away until about 30 seconds later when I realised it was all complete bull crap. It was quite bizarre because this company didn’t really have any public docs out from when chatgpt supposedly ha…

One shining use case though, I typically live in Ruby and the example code for this company was all Java and Python. Getting ChatGPT to convert the boring encryption methods into Ruby was amazing.
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