For business, I ask it to generate plans.
Interesting. I asked if for a business plan and it gave me a bunch of useless cruft. I guess that's the plausible average of public business plans anyway.
Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?
121–130 of 752 posts
Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?
#122I've found it really useful for explaining mathematical concepts using the notation and terminology I'm comfortable with.
For example, GPT-4 gave me the first explanation of backwards-input and backwards-filter convolutions that I've been able to understand. This was because I was able to start it off by explaining how I understand forward convolutions, and it explained the bw convs in the same way.
Astonishingly good.
Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?
#123Since I use ChatGPT regularly, I decided to create my own client. I prefer to avoid third-party services that require privilege escalation like Grammarly and Copilot. I have developed distinct profiles for different tasks, each with its own system prompt and input method. After getting the hang of it, I plan to tweak the parameters as well. Here are some of the profiles:
Explainer: a default, general purpose Q&A. The prompt is "Explain to me like a 3rd grader. Skip prose." I plan to expand this profile to include additional communication styles, including step-by-step explanations, elaboration, and the Socratic method.
Proofreader: I use this profile to edit, simplify, and shorten any text (including this comment). I borrowed this feature from Grammarly Go, and it works by pasting the text and clicking a button.
Developer (in development): this uses a simple editor as input, with features similar to Cody/Copilot, such as adding types, naming things, summarizing, autocomplete, auditing, explaining, fixing, refactoring, and more.
Lastly, I plan to add two more profiles that are more creative and generative: Writer and Designer. They will act as private consultants/partners and assist me in brainstorming and complementing my skills in building websites.
Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?
#124For me the main benefit is what I would describe as 'rubber ducking discovery', using it as a learning tool I am able to try out different problem domains that are completely out of my area, things like: - Web scrapping - Web crawler - Trying out Rust - Trying out pytorch and training models for computer vision problems This is all stuff that would have taken me several weekends of reading docs and geting familiar wi…
Rubber ducking discovery is a very good description of how I use it too. I don’t necessarily care if it’s 100% right, but it feels like it short circuits my “time to solution” by a significant percentage over hunting around through endless blog posts and SO answers. ChatGPT fills the gap between an idea and getting the LSP to tell me what will actually work.
Earlier today it totally hallucinated a built-in function, but when I started typing it out, the LSP kicked in and I could tell what the GPT was “thinking”. Before that I didn’t even know what the name of the function was that would do what I want, but it was close enough that it stopped me from having to parse the reference docs on my own.
Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?
#125Generally 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…
> Generally rewriting emails for clarity I built a free ChatGPT chrome extension that integrates with Gmail for better UX: https://chatgptwriter.ai (300k users so far)
Great extension! I used it recently, and had some trouble drafting email reminders (to respond to an email). Do you have any tips on how I could do that with the extension?
Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?
#126Bash scripting. I've been doing it intermittently for over 20 years but my tool set knowledge is limited. ChatGPT often shows me new ways of doing things in Bash that I'd never have thought of. It's downright brilliant.
Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?
#127Last night, I used GPT-4 to help me design a stereo matrix mixer circuit. First, I used it to help me make sense of the datasheet for a crosspoint matrix IC, and when "we" determined that the IC I was planning to use didn't support some of the functions that were critical to my design goals, it suggested a number of alternative ICs which might work, along with listing potential tradeoffs that might impact my design.…
I think I once got it to get out of "buy" mode by lying to it and telling it I'm in a sanctioned country. Maybe it's a trick that could work for you :)
Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?
#128A while back, I mentioned in a thread that I have found ChatGPT to be quite useful for correcting grammar and spelling errors ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34781888 ). Later, when they released their API, I developed a CLI tool for this purpose ( https://github.com/pncnmnp/grammatical ). Note that it is not flawless, but it works well. It has improved my writing productivity, both for blogging and emails.
LanguageTool is free and open source.
This is certainly an interesting tool. Also, it seems that they offer a great API - https://languagetool.org/http-api/.
However, it appears that the self-hosting option only gives access to the basic version (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32238705), which is still impressive, but the premium version supposedly has better grammar and style features.
Honestly, ChatGPT's $0.002 per 1k tokens is quite tempting for me. Even after hundreds of queries, my monthly usage is less than 50 cents.
Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?
#129I'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.
Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?
#130Code generation such as converting json to F# types.