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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?

#211

Post by osteele »

* Porting code (generally code that I've written) from one language or framework to another. For example, porting Python to JavaScript. [1]

* Getting started with a new platform. For example, describing the problem, and having it create a template in a front end framework, CSS framework, API generator.

* Creating instructional materials. Pasting in code and generating explanations, assessments, and grading rubrics. [2]

* Generating the first pass of API documentation, READMEs, test suites, and configuration files. Modifying configuration files. Finding configuration options based on NL descriptions.

* Quickly generating examples of API uses that are specific to my application. Finding out what libraries and APIs are available for a use case, based on an NL description.

* Learning what algorithms exist for a problem. Generating implementations of these in different languages, or that are specific to my code or data structures.

* Rarely-used system administrations commands. For example, how do I flush the DNS cache on macOS Safari and Chrome? (Questions such as this are actually better on Perplexity.ai than on ChatGPT.)

* Pasting in error messages or descriptions of problems, and asking for solutions.

* Tie-breaker questions about what to name a file, function, or set of functions.

In general, I find that it takes a lot of the drudgery out of programming. (Similar to Copilot, but for a different, generally more macro, set of areas.) For example, I asked it to solve a geometry problem and generate a test harness for both interactively and batch testing it. It's solution to the problem itself was a non-starter, but the test harness was great and would have been involved boring work in order to write.

I also use it to generate emails, project proposals, feedback, etc. I don't think it's ever come up with anything usable, but seeing what's wrong with its attempt is an easier way for me to get started than looking at a blank page or searching for examples of the writing form on the web are.

[1] https://notes.osteele.com/gpt-experiments/using-chatgpt-to-p... [2] https://notes.osteele.com/gpt-experiments/chatgpt-code-expla... [3] https://notes.osteele.com/gpt-experiments/discussing-an-ardu...

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

#212

Post by thih9 »

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…

> and even a bit of therapy

I’d be very careful with relying on gpt for anything health related; I’m not saying there can’t be benefits, just that the risks increase exponentially.

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

#213

Post by knome »

yosito wrote: post #177
carlmr wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So on my coding problems I haven't had much luck. It doesn't seem to know Bazel, the Rust code I asked about was completely hallucinated, but it did solve a problem with Azure DevOps I had. I think if the training set did not contain enough of something it can't really think of a solution. What is really nice though it's as you say the refinement of questions. Sometimes it's hard to think of the right query, maybe yo…

Yeah, I gave it a simple task of encoding a secret message in a sentence by using the first letter of every word. Hello = "Hey everyone, lick less onions". I worked with the prompts for over an hour to try to get it to complete the task, and while I did have some success, it really struggled to reason about the task or provide a valid response. If it can't even reason about a child's game, I can imagine it struggles…

I think the most interesting response I've gotten was one where gpt-4 noticed halfway through a response that it had made an error, apologized and then put the corrected sentence. When I queried it, it claimed it generates the response a token at a time, and could not back up when it realized the message was incorrect, but I don't know enough about how the tech works to ascertain the veracity of the statement.

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

#214

Post by esbeeb »

"Dear ChatGPT, please submit perfectly acceptable and politely worded PR's which elegantly fix all the software bugs in Debian's bug database: https://www.debian.org/Bugs/ I'm referring to all bugs for the upcoming "bookworm" release. The PR's should fulfill all of the Debian project's policies and guidelines. For the AMD64 and ARM64 architectures. Much appreciated.

By Monday March 27th, 5:00pm +08, 2023. Thanks!"

https://mstdn.ca/@sbb/110083097733267112

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

#215

Post by [deleted] »

andsoitis wrote: post #184
yosito wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I gave it a simple task of encoding a secret message in a sentence by using the first letter of every word. Hello = "Hey everyone, lick less onions". I worked with the prompts for over an hour to try to get it to complete the task, and while I did have some success, it really struggled to reason about the task or provide a valid response. If it can't even reason about a child's game, I can imagine it struggles…

> I don't think it's actually reasoning about things at all, just providing a statistically plausible response to prompts. It turns out that humanity’s problem might not be that AIs can think but rather that humans believe that AIs can think. One might even go so far as to say there’s a real danger that we hallucinate that AIs can think, to our detriment.

[deleted]

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

#216

Post by bitcoinmoney »

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…

Is there a tutorial you followed before to train your own model?

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

#217

Post by bitcoinmoney »

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…

Do you run your own customized model or just chat GPT?

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

#218

Post by thih9 »

Follow up question, how come discussions like this rarely mention virtual assistants like Siri/Alexa/etc?

So many use cases overlap, there’s potential for improvements but Siri still struggles to understand context and gpt has no way to access my calendar (at least in a way that I’d like). I guess this will change fast?

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

#219

Post by jamespwilliams »

yosito wrote: post #177
carlmr wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So on my coding problems I haven't had much luck. It doesn't seem to know Bazel, the Rust code I asked about was completely hallucinated, but it did solve a problem with Azure DevOps I had. I think if the training set did not contain enough of something it can't really think of a solution. What is really nice though it's as you say the refinement of questions. Sometimes it's hard to think of the right query, maybe yo…

Yeah, I gave it a simple task of encoding a secret message in a sentence by using the first letter of every word. Hello = "Hey everyone, lick less onions". I worked with the prompts for over an hour to try to get it to complete the task, and while I did have some success, it really struggled to reason about the task or provide a valid response. If it can't even reason about a child's game, I can imagine it struggles…

This is probably a tokenisation problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33915287 (which is an artefact of the way the model was trained)

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

#220

Post by spaceman_2020 »

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…

Exactly how I’m using it as well. It’s absolutely incredible as a coding productivity tool.
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