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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?

#311

Post by rsp1984 »

This week I wrote and filed a complete patent application for a side project of mine all by my own for the first time. I've done some patents in the past but those were through my employers and using patent attorneys to do the drafting.

For most of the technical text drafting ChatGPT proved to be overchallenged, however it was a phenomenal help answering dozens of questions that I had about specific wordings, goals, processes, things to avoid and more. The type of information I would have searched on Google for hours with uncertain chances of success. Sure, there's a chance that ChatGPT just made it up but most of the answers made complete sense in my view.

I also used it to rephrase some boilerplate from other patents that needed to go in there but which I didn't want to copy verbatim. It did well in most cases but failed in about one or two.

But overall still blown away by it and pretty sure we'll see rapid progress from here.

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

#312

Post by f6v »

imiric wrote: post #286
nibbleshifter wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I really doubt it would be faster to write code manually, even with the state of AI tools today. Even with very sophisticated keyboard macros and traditional autocompletion, someone using GPT would outperform anyone who doesn't. Think of the amount of boilerplate and tests you write, and tedious API documentation lookups you do daily; that all goes away with GPT. The amount of work to double check whether the generat…

My experience was always that most of my time isn’t deducted to writing code. Maybe 10%, the rest us thinking about how the code I write will fit into the existing architecture or accommodate future features.

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

#314

Post by imiric »

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…

That's an interesting interview, thanks for sharing.

Though I draw the line with using these tools at helping me out with the drudgery of daily work. I don't want them to impersonate me, or write emails on my behalf. I cringe whenever Gmail suggests the next phrase it thinks I want to write. It's akin to someone trying to end your sentences for you. Stop putting words in my mouth!

The recent Microsoft 365 Copilot presentation, where the host had it ghost write a speech for their kid's graduation party[1]—complete with cues about where to look(!)—is unbelievably cringey. Do these people really think AI should be assisting with such personal matters? Do they really find doing these things themselves a chore?

> And I have no idea why things are like this.

Oh, I think it's pretty clear. The amount of resources required to run this on personal machines is still prohibitively high. I saw in one of your posts you mentioned you use 8xA100s. That's a crazy amount of compute unreachable by most people, not to mention the disk space it requires. Once the resource requirements are lowered, and our personal devices are _much_ more powerful, then self-hosting would be feasible.

Another, perhaps larger, reason, is that AI tools are still a business advantage for companies, so it's no wonder that they want to keep them to themselves. I think this will change and open source LLMs will be widespread in a few years, but proprietary services will still be more popular.

And lastly, most people just don't want/like/know how to self-host _anything_. There's a technical barrier to entry, for sure, but even if that is lowered, most people are entirely willing to give up their personal data for the convenience of using a proprietary service. You can see this today with web, mail, file servers, etc.; self-hosting is still done by a very niche group of privacy-minded tech-literate people.

Anyway, thanks for leading the way, and spreading the word about why self-hosting these tools is important. I hope that our vision becomes a reality for many soon.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebls5x-gb0s

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

#315

Post by VoodooJuJu »

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…

Could you mock-up what might be a typical email written by you, then pass it through GPT, then post both responses here? I'd be curious to see what the difference looks like for someone else's writing. I've tried this exact use-case and noticed a drop in quality and clarity, rather than an improvement.

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

#316

Post by yadingus »

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…

> And I have no idea why things are like this.

Propaganda. These tools are not for the people, and I'm convinced the idea of how much better our lives could be if technology was thoughtfully designed to truly serve the user is purposely and subtly filtered from the collective conversation.

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

#317

Post by newshorts »

Used it live with my team to write an inspirational speech then I read back to the team. We all had a good laugh.

It’s just not contextual enough yet to understand how to sound genuine to a team that has had enough connection and time together to have developed our own norms.

I also tried to use it to limit the string length of a type in typescript and it hallucinated an answer that probably should be how they implement that feature’s ergonomic. Threw me for a loop because it looked so legit, but alas the feature doesn’t actually exist.

GPT does shine bright if you are exploring/brainstorming a new topic at 2am and there’s no one else to run your ideas past.

I also have successfully used it to round out my thoughts about high level topics and think of things I would not have when developing plans.

For the time being, I view it less as a competitor to my brain and more of a compliment.

In relationships we tend to develop dependencies on our partners where our deficiencies are their strengths. I guess I’m still learning about the strengths of GPT.

It’s striking that I already view this technology as a potential “partner” of sorts, different than a simple “resource” like google or stack overflow.

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

#318

Post by znpy »

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.…

Me neither.

I’m waiting for the whole thing to evolve enough to have self hosted stuff to run at home.

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

#319

Post by Karunamon »

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #310
jwally wrote: post #288

I just asked it to make an itinerary for a 45 minute long 6 year old boy's soccer practice. It was almost perfect. It needs to be tweaked (3 minutes for cool down?) but it did 95% of the heavy lifting. I also asked it for vacation ideas with nice cabins and trailer hookups with outdoor activities for kids and nice cabins within 200 miles of where I live - it was almost perfect in its response. I have trouble starting…

Can you explain how ChatGPT's soccer itinerary is any different from the top google search [1] for the subject? Is ChatGPT's response any more useful or meaningfully different from the practice routines at the link? [1] https://www.soccerhelp.com/soccer-practice-plans.shtml

It didn't require using Google, for one. That alone should be worth something.

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

#320

Post by re-thc »

imiric wrote: post #286
nibbleshifter wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I really doubt it would be faster to write code manually, even with the state of AI tools today. Even with very sophisticated keyboard macros and traditional autocompletion, someone using GPT would outperform anyone who doesn't. Think of the amount of boilerplate and tests you write, and tedious API documentation lookups you do daily; that all goes away with GPT. The amount of work to double check whether the generat…

> I really doubt it would be faster to write code manually,

Not faster or slower but at what quality?

At least every time I've tried to ask GPT 3 & 4 to write anything it's always missing things or not even close to the optimal way that I have to look up the docs and fill in the gaps, which often takes just as long as starting from scratch.

> now basic GitHub Copilot is that it greatly improves their productivity

Perhaps it depends on what you're working on. If it's quick iterations that isn't that concerned about what code goes in and whether it's maintainable then sure.

It's impressive but for now still has lots of gaps. However it is over confident and often misleading.

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