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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?

#371

Post by fanagra32 »

applesauce004 wrote: post #328
fooker wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who are downvoting this: please set up and use GitHub copilot once, maybe for some auxiliary thing not connected to your main task. It is not just a tool for students to write assignments. In experienced hands it can easily double your productivity.

I agree with this statement a lot. Using Copilot saves you a lot of tedium if you are comfortable with the language already. If you are new to the language, then it might trip you up a bit (at least in its current incarnation). Here is an example where it helps. I tried to initiate a connection to a Mongodb server using Python. While i have used many databases before, I have never used Python and MongoDB together. So…

And you will have no idea whether the solution it presents to you is idiomatic or recommended or contains some common critical flaw or is hopelessly outdated. How can you find out? Back to alt-tabbing to the browser.

Sure it may take a bit more time to get going, but then you'll get it right the first time and learn something along the way. Your copilot example is just another iteration of copy-and-paste some random snippet from StackOverflow in the hope that it will work, but without having seen its context, like from when is the post and what comments, good or bad, did it get.

I'd actually be pretty afraid of a codebase that is created like that.

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

#372

Post by breckenedge »

I’ve been trying to use it to come up with crossword puzzles and word-finding puzzles. Not quite there yet, but maybe more prompting would help?

I have used it to help come up with lesson plans for various topics. In general the lesson plan sucks, but it may contain 1-2 things that I forgot to cover.

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

#373

Post by [deleted] »

hermannj314 wrote: post #349

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 w…

[deleted]

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

#374

Post by spaceman_2020 »

roflyear wrote: post #352
alchemist1e9 wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here and GPT-4 was definitely a noticeable improvement.

You know, I thought so but then recently I asked it to code me a function to do a financial calc and it just didn't get there at all. It gave me code but it was really poor and didn't do close to what I wanted. But when I gave it my code it did generate useful data for unit tests. So that's pretty cool.

I’ve found that whenever it gets something really wrong, it’s either corrected by a follow up prompt (telling it that its wrong helps), or rephrasing the question.

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

#375

Post by yosito »

hermannj314 wrote: post #349

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 w…

This is fascinating to me. For me the value of having a therapist is having another human being to listen to what I'm going through. Just talking to the computer provides little value to me at all, especially if the computer is just responding with the statistically likely response. I've had enough "training data" myself in my life that I can already tell myself what a therapist would "probably" tell me.

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

#376

Post by politician »

re-thc wrote: post #320
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…

> 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 Per…

Which language is it struggling with?

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

#377

Post by [deleted] »

namaria wrote: post #139
lisasays wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a certain point in my life, I came to the conclusion that if something is important enough, it generally pays to: (1) either research the matter myself until I was satisfied that I understood the cost/risk tradeoff sufficiently; or (2) if I don't have the time or skills to do that, have the matter reviewed professionally. Both of which are alternatives to "doing nothing". Employment or other contracts, health deci…

Hiring professionals is often about transferring liabilities to knowledgeable people. I wouldn't want to respond for something done by some automatic tool whose output I don't fully understand.

[deleted]

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

#378

Post by kkwteh »

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

The top google search always comes with a lot of ads and other crap that you have to filter through. Also the response might not be exactly what your looking for (you might not have the same materials.) For instance you can ask chatgpt to create a practice plan that doesn’t require cones, or is focused on a certain set of skills, etc.

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

#379

Post by nimbix »

I gave a UX person a snippet of debugging code to paste into the console, but didn't notice that the chat app ate the quotes around a string. GPT was able to fix the snippet for him. SO far this is the only case where someone I know managed to use it for something useful in practice.

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

#380

Post by gradys »

hermannj314 wrote: post #349

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 w…

This sounds like a long running conversation. Are there problems with extending past the context window?
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