Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive? • Hacker News Board

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

#341

Post by WickyNilliams » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 12:57 PM UTC

I've tried using it a few times. Just now I asked it for a piano practice routine, since I am quite bad at structuring my practice. The suggestion seemed OK.

When I started probing it about specifics it got increasingly incorrect. As I asked about specific chords, voicings etc it was not able to be consistent between two short replies. Or even between sentences in a single reply! Here is one reply where I asked about suspended chords to see how it would fare:

> A chord consisting of A-C-D-E would be an Asus2(add9) chord. The "sus2" implies the absence of the third and the "add9"implies the addition of the ninth (B).

There's no B in that chord! And it mentions omitting the third even though it's there.

If I'm honest I've been continually disappointed with it. I see so many people excited and getting hype, but it falls flat for me every time. The same when I've tried it with coding problems.

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

#342

Post by amolgupta » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 1:05 PM UTC

I have a habit of making short bullet points notes for everything work and personal, but for my eyes only. With GPT, I can convert them into things like:

- PR descriptions. ex, paste bullet points about the change and it converts it into something to help the reviewer.

- Plant UML diagrams of ideas. At times they are just a starting point template and I build upon them. I can paste these into technical docs or PRs or presentations later.

- Peer feedback: The raw bullet points can be converted into nice-to-read feedback which is not too direct or offensive or vague. Can iterate over it to tone it down or make a point stronger.

Other programming-related use cases - Test cases for code

- Converting android xml layouts to compose worked well

- A lot of Django code

- Identify performance issues or bugs in code (these tasks make me realize the amount of repetition there is in programming)

Others:

- Book recommendations on topics

- Rewording emails/slack messages

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

#343

Post by hsjqllzlfkf » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 1:06 PM UTC

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.…

So, are you using Google search?

Your argument of "I don't trust it with my data and won't until you can self host" should apply to google search as well, no?

And alternative take is that for whatever reason you've decided you didn't want to use new tools, a posteriori created an argument to justify that, and haven't realized the same argument applies to your old tools.

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

#344

Post by barbarr » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 1:07 PM UTC

bitcoinmoney wrote: post #217

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?

Just ChatGPT.

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

#345

Post by hsjqllzlfkf » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 1:08 PM UTC

thefz wrote: post #257

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.

Good for you! If you don't want to learn new tools, you shouldn't.

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

#346

Post by zitsarethecure » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 1:09 PM UTC

nomilk wrote: post #102

The past week I used GPT for about 80% of my commit messages. I put it in a terminal command so all I type is 'commit' and that's equivalent to: git add . && git commit -m "message" && git push. The message is generated automatically via the GPT API. I made it public in case anyone else wants to try/use/fork it: https://github.com/stevecondylios/gpt-generated-commit-messa... It's very convenient for README and docs c…

Seems rather costly to do it this way. Why not just leave an effectively empty commit message and then use GPT to generate a summary based on the diff only when you need one?

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

#347

Post by rodrigodlu » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 1:11 PM UTC

Getting answers for AWS stuff, like CLI commands and others that are extremely obtuse to find using the aws docs.

Sometimes the command/configuration is not really correct, but you can find the correct article easily.

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

#348

Post by apollo_mojave » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 1:11 PM UTC

I am a full time language student, and I use GPT to have "conversations" in the language. I can give it a subject (e.g., going through airport customs) and practice my conversation skills.

What's also fun is I can feed it a list of vocab that I want it to use, and it'll find ways to put the words in the conversation. I also ask it to go back, look at my responses, and correct for grammar etc.

It's shocking how adept it is.

What also lurks in the back of my mind is the possibility that mine is the last generation that will bother learning a foreign language at all. I think the day of the universal translator is approaching.

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

#349

Post by hermannj314 » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 1:11 PM UTC

I have a few conversations going.

My most productive is a therapy session with ChatGPT as therapist. I told it my values, my short term goals, and some areas in my life where I'd like to have more focus and areas where I would like to spend less time.

Some days we are retrospective and some days we are planning. My therapist gets me back on track, never judges, and has lots of motivational ideas for me. All aligned with my values and goals.

Last weekend, I went on a hike because ChatGPT told me to. My life is better if I just do what it says.

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

#350

Post by mlboss » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 1:15 PM UTC

f6v wrote: post #312

imiric wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In very near future your IDE will send the whole codebase as context to LLMs. Then instead of thinking up all possibilities you can just ask. LLM will suggest multiple alternatives and you can select the best when and ask it to implement it.