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.
Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?
401–410 of 752 posts
Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?
#402I 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…
The robots are even coming for therapists. Yikes!
Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?
#403Plain old Bing Chat - which I feel a bit better about using because I'm not paying for it and not contributing to the problem that way - used for its original intended purpose of search. Compared to trying out keywords and reading through the results myself, it's faster to ask the question, let Bing read the pages, and let Bing summarize the results to me. I recently got access to Anthropic Claude, which I don't feel…
Why do you feel like they are destroying the world, OpenAI in particular?
Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?
#404I fed it some documentation I wrote that had 2 FAQs and asked it what additional questions a user might have after reading the page. It came up with 10 additional questions, about half of which I added to our actual FAQ section!
Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?
#405Generally 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…
You reminded me: I discovered that ChatGPT had invented an API for me. Has that happened to you yet? Since it went to the trouble of writing code for the API as well, I contacted the API developers to follow up about the topic. The code given was kind of a hand-wave anyway so I'd need to polish it up. The developers were surprised to hear they had an API. In truth, there was no such thing. I then found myself in one…
I asked it to `curl` my homepage and pretend to be a terminal, only executing the command and showing the output.
It got the format etc right but the actual content was completely hallucinated.
Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?
#406Since I use ChatGPT regularly, I decided to create my own client. I prefer to avoid third-party services that require privilege escalation like Grammarly and Copilot. I have developed distinct profiles for different tasks, each with its own system prompt and input method. After getting the hang of it, I plan to tweak the parameters as well. Here are some of the profiles: Explainer: a default, general purpose Q&A. The…
Fascinating idea. Can you share some code or screenshots of your client?
I don't think there's anything unique about my client, and since I'm too embarrassed to open-source my spaghetti code, I'm sharing this demo instead: https://nitter.net/itsuka_dev/status/1639631487493632000#m
Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?
#407I 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…
> 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 told it to write a story for me using only the top 100 most common words in Hungarian. First, it complained about how the concept of a "word" is ambiguous in Hungarian and that it's difficult to know what the top 100 words are. Then it told me a story using only common vocabulary. It wasn't grammatically perfect, but definitely a cool ability. I suppose you could also give it your own list of the words you know, and have it have a conversation with you only using those words. If you had an ongoing conversation with it, it could add new words as it realizes that you've learned them. I think this actually has the potential to make a new type of language learning app that could be really cool.
Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
For each cheesy training video, playwright opens the page, runs a timer, clicks an element to load the quiz page, copies the question and possible answers, and sends them to the GPT-4 API for the best possible solution, clicks on the element that was answered as the most likely solution, and repeats. Since these video/quizzes are recurring and terrible, it was worth automating
There's something fascinating about the fact that an organization collectively made the decisions that lead to this outcome.
Some of the largest corporations are amazing machines to waste the time and lives of thousands of people to do useless jobs so that other people in turn have a useless job processing or undoing the first group’s work. It’s frankly amazing.
Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?
#409Earlier 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…
> Think of the amount of boilerplate and tests you write, and tedious API documentation lookups you do daily; that all goes away with GPT.
At work we have really worked hard to minimise boilerplate and manually-written/repetitive tests, so I don't write much of that. Getting GPT to write it would certainly be worse: we would still have the deadweight of boilerplate/repetition even if we didn't have to write it, and some of it would be incorrect. Maybe this varies a lot by company — if you're often writing a lot of repetitive code, and for whatever reason you can't fix the deeper issues, then something like GPT/Copilot could be a godsend.
About documentation lookups, I don't know if this varies by language, but I've had very little luck with using GPT for this. For the languages I use regularly, I can find anything I need in the documentation very rapidly. When I've tried to use GPT to answer the same questions, it occasionally gives completely wrong answers (wasting my time if I believe it), and almost always misses out some subtlety that turned out to be important. It just doesn't seem to be very good for this purpose yet.
Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?
#410I 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…
The robots are even coming for therapists. Yikes!
What therapists lol #broke
I'd pick a human over an AI every time for therapy but I'd also pick an AI over nothing.