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

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

#591

Post by roflyear » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 9:10 PM UTC

throwaway4aday wrote: post #364

roflyear wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes unless you understand the problem well it is hard to fix it. Might as well code it yourself. I suspect the people who find this amazing tech don't program much or are using this very differently than we are. Or program very differently than us.

If you share your prompts then we could help. The most generally applicable thing I can think of is that you have to drop your old habits from using search engines, those types of queries will not get you very far. You have to talk to it like you would talk to someone in your company Slack/Teams/whatever chat and explain what it is you're trying to do and what tools you want to use to do it. Then ask it to refine its…

I'm not talking about informational stuff.

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

#592

Post by roflyear » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 9:11 PM UTC

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #374

roflyear wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nope, not my experience - unless it's a trivial problem. In my experience it almost always gets stuck in a loop where it's rotating between two or more incorrect implementations. It isn't doing iteration - it's just looping. Even if I point out the problem directly, it will just say "sorry, you're right - here's the correction!" and the correction has the same response from an earlier item that I pointed out had a problem!

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

#593

Post by imiric » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 9:18 PM UTC

plorkyeran wrote: post #583

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…

If you eliminated 100% of my code typing time with perfect effectiveness I think that'd make me maybe 10% or 20% more productive? Turning ideas of what the code should be doing into code just isn't a bottleneck for me in the first place. Are there people who just add net 1000 lines of code to whatever they're working on every single day or something?

I keep seeing this point made, but AI tools don't save you just typing time. They save you time you would previously use to lookup documentation, search the web and Stack Overflow answers. They save you time it takes to navigate and understand a codebase, write boilerplate code and tests, propose implementation suggestions, etc.

Dismissing them on the basis that they just save you typing time is not seeing their full potential.

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

#594

Post by thih9 » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 9:18 PM UTC

dr_dshiv wrote: post #281

thih9 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and even a bit of therapy I’d be very careful with relying on gpt for anything health related; I’m not saying there can’t be benefits, just that the risks increase exponentially.

Risky vs what? Googling? Not doing anything? Waiting for a therapist? It’s extremely sensitive to human emotional dynamics. It is also extremely biased toward non violent communication, which is very hard for humans.

As risky as any other health related self help, plus the added risk of unreliability.

When GPT proves itself to be reliably beneficial, then therapists will use it or recommend it themselves. Until then it’s an experimental tool at best.

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

#595

Post by imiric » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 9:30 PM UTC

jhugo wrote: post #409

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…

> 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 s…

> At work we have really worked hard to minimise boilerplate and manually-written/repetitive tests, so I don't write much of that.

There's boilerplate in any codebase, even if you make an effort to minimize it. There are always patterns, repeated code structure, CI and build tool configuration, etc.

If nothing else, just being able to say "write a test for this function", which covers all code paths, mocking, fuzzing, etc., would be a huge timesaver, even if you have to end up fixing the code manually. From what I've seen, this is already possible with current tools; imagine how the accuracy will improve with future generations. Today it's not much different from reviewing code from a coworker, but soon you'll just be able to accept the changes with a quick overview, or right away.

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

#596

Post by precompute » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 9:41 PM UTC

throwaway675309 wrote: post #569

precompute wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That won't happen, you can't expect to be "left behind" by a tool that's this easy to use. The big downsides of using a LLM will show up long-term, people will be chained to them and won't be able to do simple, trivial things on their own.

Most people can't change their own oil, replace radiator fluid, or know the difference between a hubcap and a distributor cap. And yet life seemingly goes on...

Sure, but they can read, synthesize information, understand things without it being spoonfed to them. Or at least a certain slice of the population can. But when that slice gets a really simplified interface they're going to be chained to it hopelessly. The day when people need a LLM / ""AI"" to translate real life for them into their personal vocabulary isn't far off. It won't signal the start of some enlightened age, instead, it'll be the end of literacy. These systems feed on the user, and then it gets recursive.

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

#597

Post by pfoof » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 9:50 PM UTC

Maybe not too productive but I often ask:

* "How to not be behind the technological advancements",

* "What are the future-proof jobs after the AI revolution",

* "How to get to the cutting-edge of my field".

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

#598

Post by VierScar » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 10:22 PM UTC

thih9 wrote: post #230

theonlybutlet wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you, I intend on stealing your phrase "skip prose", was trying to find a way to force it to exclude this whilst saving tokens.

I’m unfamiliar with gpt and tokens, what would “skip prose” change?

The annoying habit GPT has of restating the question as the start of the answer. "How do I write a function in JavaScript to sort a list of cities by population grouped by region?

GPT: To sort a list of cities by population grouped by region, in JavaScript, would at a high level require 3 steps...."

Super frustrating when you just want the answer without the "polite professionalism"

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

#599

Post by danicriss » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 10:53 PM UTC

zimmund wrote: post #529

gabrieledarrigo wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man please, go to a real therapist with experience.

Why? What are your arguments against AI in this scenario?

AI is not trained to identify disorders, nor is it trained to alleviate them / help the affected person cope with them. Ditto re. trauma.

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

#600

Post by haswell » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 10:53 PM UTC

alwaysbeconsing wrote: post #559

haswell wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I share the privacy concerns, and look forward to running these kinds of models locally in the near future. > chatgpt and other LLMs are known to hallucinate. What if it’s advice is wrong or makes you worse in the long term because it’s just regurgitating whatever at you? As someone on a long-term therapy journey, I would be far less concerned about this. Therapy is rarely about doing exactly what one is told, it's a…

This is all true, and it's not clear the grandparent is doing this. Last sentence of the original post: > Last weekend, I went on a hike because ChatGPT told me to. My life is better if I just do what it says. I'm not sure how literally to take that sentence, but it's worrisome.

I think my point was more that if they're doing what it says, that says more about where they’re at mentally (able to take action) and the quality of the advice (they’re willing to follow it).

My stance here is based on an optimistic outlook that a person seeking therapeutic advice is by doing so demonstrating enough awareness that they’re probably capable of recognizing a good idea from a bad one.

I realize this can get into other territory and there are very problematic failure modes in the worst cases.

Regarding “My life is better if I just do what it says.”, I think concern is a fair reaction and I don’t think the author fully thought that through. But at the same time, it’s entirely possible that it’s true (for now).

If someone continues to follow advice that is clearly either bad or not working, then it becomes concerning.

But that was the other point of my anecdote. It became pretty clear to me what wasn’t working, even at a time that I wasn’t really sure how the whole thing worked.