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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?

#711

Post by flyval »

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.

Have you actually tried it yourself? I’d recommend it. And I don’t mean just playing with it —- Try using it to help you build something. It’s much more efficient than googling and combing through stackoverflow. Hallucinations are not as common as you’re thinking.

You clearly can’t just take the code, paste it in, and trust that it works, but you shouldn’t be doing that with stackoverflow either.

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

#712

Post by flyval »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #289
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 trust it with my data, and won't rely on such tools until I can self-host them, and they can be entirely offline. Interestingly, my point to The Verge was exactly that. https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1633456289639542789 Me: > So, imagine it. You'll have a ChatGPT on your laptop -- your very own, that you can use for whatever purposes you want. Personally, I'll be hooking it up to read my emails and le…

I mean, google has access to ~all of that stuff anyway. Even if you’re self-hosting your email+calendar, everyone else isn’t.

I’d love to have more privacy on everything, but realistically, the ship’s sailed on most of it.

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

#713

Post by wackychimp »

I like it because I can paste an SQL query in and it has an immediate understanding of the layout of my database (only columns and tables included in my query of course - but I can also describe other tables too in the conversation). Then I can have a conversation with it and it can help troubleshoot my issues. I'm terrible with JOINS and it's been helpful in getting me the data I need.

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

#714

Post by marloncots »

Like others here, I’ve used it to mostly replace the Stack Overflow and Google type queries I was doing before. It has also been a good replacement for reading through documentation when I’ve started work in a new library of coding language. It’s the best “rubber duck” (other than a real human) that I have ever had.

However, other than sometimes being confidently wrong, I have found that it sometimes will suggest solutions that rely private functions. I assume this is because it’s learning from the source code itself. This is has been especially true in Android SDK libraries. On the other hand, it is impressive when I inform it of the private function use and it corrects itself.

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

#715

Post by JeremyNT »

deely3 wrote: post #296
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…

Can I just say that Im actually become scared reading your comment? Personally I would never ask chatGPT these questions because for me these questions are hard to verify, and knowing how often AI likes to hallucinate.. I just can't trust it. You mentioned 50/50 correctness in domain questions. I can't be sure that other hard to verify questions do not follow these percentage..

I'm reluctant for the same reasons.

Google search might uncover BS too, but I'm already calibrated to expect it, and there are plenty of sources right alongside whatever I pulled the result from where I can go immediately get a second opinion.

With the LLMs, maybe they're spot on 95% of the time, but the 5% or whatever is bullshit, but it's all said in the same "voice" with the same apparent degree of confidence and presented without citations. It becomes both more difficult to verify a specific claim (because there's not one canonical source for it) as well as it involves more cognitive load (in that I specifically have to context switch to another tool to check it).

Babysitting a tool that's exceptionally good at creating plausible bullshit every now and then means a new way of working that I don't think I'm willing to adopt.

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

#718

Post by mrafi2 »

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…

Interesting, Just on the paraphrasing bit, would love to know your thoughts on Quillbot or Wordtune

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

#719

Post by hnthrowaway0328 »

itsuka wrote: post #248
thih9 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m unfamiliar with gpt and tokens, what would “skip prose” change?

It is hinting GPT to skip generating unimportant texts such as filler words, while still maintaining coherence in the output. For example, if I asked GPT "How to make bibimbap?" with the prompt "skip prose", it will give concise list of ingredients and instructions in about ~250 tokens [1]. Without the prompt, it would first explain what bibimbap is and then give a slightly longer instructions, totaling around ~360 t…

I'm wondering if it can remove all "a"/"the"/"an" from the output to further reduce # of tokens spent.

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

#720

Post by LookUpStuff »

gbro3n wrote: post #567
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.

I wonder if as more and more online content is AI generated, it will be harder to find human generated content to train the AI's on? Like a cumulative echo effect.

Maybe it’s happening now. It would be interesting to see some weekly figures for published Stack Overflow articles, to see if they’re in decline. There are so many unknowns with this whole subject. How much it will help or hinder society as a whole is a rollercoaster ride that we’re all strapped into, whether anyone asked for it.
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