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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?

#251

Post by mtlynch »

tom-jh wrote: post #229

Encouraged by the comments here, I tried a few prompts for it to do something useful for our company. Most failed, but it's apparently great at improving our documentation. Here's the prompt and the result as an example: > Can you improve the following text for clarity: "When deploying into the enterprise, there is a lot of flexibility when it comes to deciding how you structure the deployment, whether you want to ru…

IMHO, GPT didn't do a particularly good rewrite.

The original first sentence is overly long and complex, and so is GPT's. The original obscures the meaning behind passive voice, and GPT added even more passive voice ("should be based on your intended use").

I'll give credit to GPT for eliminating the ambiguity around "discuss these," but the rest of the changes don't improve the clarity much for me.

I appreciate that GPT's feedback is free and instant, but you can make deeper fixes to your writing with a one-time exercise that will probably take 10-20 hours and cost a few hundred dollars. Consider hiring a freelance editor to review your work and identify anti-patterns in your writing. I did this a few years ago, and it substantially improved my writing.[0]

The anti-patterns I notice in this snippet:

* Omission of actors for verbs ("when deploying into the enterprise" - who's deploying?)

* Overloading sentences with complexity (first sentence is very long and has complex structure, complex wording)

* Packing together verbs in a confusing way ("comes to deciding how you structure", "depend on how you plan to use")

* Ambiguous pronouns ("which ones", "discuss these")

[0] https://mtlynch.io/editor/

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

#252

Post by orbital-decay »

baq wrote: post #204
AlexTrask wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My advice to learn programming is to avoid shortcuts and do the hard things like read the documentation

This absolutely isn’t how humans learn. Humans learn by doing. Once you grasp the basics, you can read some documentation. Otherwise there’s not enough ground for the docs to make sense. Once you’re comfortable with the basics by all means read the table of contents to know what you don’t know. I recommend this especially when dealing with databases, it’s amazing how many people never advance past the apprenticeship…

> This absolutely isn’t how humans learn. Humans learn by doing.

That depends on both the subject and the person. Some learn better by understanding the fundamentals first. Some subjects (in CS/SE as well) might not even be approachable without it.

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

#254

Post by motoboi »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #90

I use it to optimize my Python + Pandas code. Dump some code in and say “Can you rewrite this code to be faster”. It even gives explanations as to why it’s making those changes. Another one I use it for is saying “Rewrite this code to run on multiple cores”. Really saves me a lot of Googling time as these are things I want, but I don’t find much pleasure in actually writing code. I’ve also used it to generate some pr…

Very good at "vectorizing" plain python code to pandas.

I just put code like using `for row in df:` and get idiomatic vectorized pandas

The challenge is not it knowing how to do, but understanding what you want to do.

Code plus explanation works very well for more complex things.

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

#255

Post by porcoda »

I’m not using it at all. Until I can run it locally and guarantee my interactions with it are entirely private and under my control, I won’t touch it or related services. I’m constantly surprised to see people who talk so much about privacy and data protection using such systems. That said, when self hosting is an option I’m very excited to use it.

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

#256

Post by motoboi »

ractive wrote: post #161

One convenient usecase for me is to generate model classes from a sample JSON document: "please create me a java class using lombok from this JSON: {...}" Also vice versa: "create a JSON document with sample data from this java model class: "public class Person {String name; ...}"

There is an online JSON to lombok https://instantwebtools.net/json-to-java

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

#257

Post by thefz »

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.…

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

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

#258

Post by motoboi »

nwatson wrote: post #32

I've been a paying ChatGPT subscriber for about three or four weeks now. One day I had a few thorny work issues, asked the free version, and it was so good I got a subscription. Since then I've asked some about general knowledge, history, religion, geography, politics, other topics of interest. Mostly in English, but some in Portuguese and a little in Spanish. It's extremely good in all three languages. Mostly though…

I just asked it to summarize your comment:

Summary: - The user has been a paying ChatGPT subscriber for 3-4 weeks and has found it to be extremely helpful in resolving work-related issues. - ChatGPT has been helpful in providing general knowledge, surveys of categories of tools, specifics on how to use/configure/program against various tools, and advice on best practices and pitfalls. - The user mainly asks questions related to macOS, Linux, AWS, kubernetes, observability tools, and APIs for DevOps-related systems. - ChatGPT has reduced the user's reliance on Google search by 70%. - The user has found ChatGPT to be helpful in structuring questions and question progressions to get quick answers. - ChatGPT sometimes makes up stuff, but it's usually close enough. - The user is committed to Jetbrains tools but is exploring CoPilot and has downloaded the CoPilot plugin for PyCharm.

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

#260

Post by _xnmw »

Yesterday I just used it for the first time instead of checking the Postgres docs for some obscure JSON operators. I just asked it this:

"I have a postgres database with a json column with the following structure: [1, 2, 4, 4]. How do I query the database in SQL to retrieve all rows where the array in the json column contains the number 4?"

And it gave me a wrong answer at first (worked for strings only, not integers), but quickly corrected itself after I pointed out the mistake. I had working, testable code faster than if I had checked SO or browsed the Postgres docs.

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