Ask HN: What's your favorite GPT powered tool?

I have been using LLMs to automatically repair security vulnerabilities. I have a set of tools which build prompts describing the environment and the output of vulnerability scans. The tool then requests a shell script to disable/fix/update the vulnerability. The script is submitted as a PR which has actions that run integration tests. Human intervention is sometimes needed, but the focus is on better engineering of prompts (and by proxy tooling).

Describing the environment relies heavily on a CMDB, so this is not a one-size-fits-all approach and this is functioning entirely in my personal lab of ~100 servers. That said, ChatGPT has given me the best results compared to locally run LLMs

Its not fixing things for me (yet) but I'm using it for brainstorming, for transforming long-form content to tweets, and prototype code generation.

I've been using it to learn programming concepts I'm unfamiliar with and I perceive a huge difference in quality of chat-gpt answers between:

- Salesforce API

- AWS

- React Native

The react native docs are good enough that I really empathize with what you're saying - wouldn't I just be faster reading the docs? However, for salesforce I feel exactly the opposite - the docs are all over the place and message boards tend to be of low quality for the subject.

For what it's worth, AWS felt somewhere in the middle depending on the service.

This aligns perfectly with my experience. I feel like I haven't found the correct way to utilize these tools yet as, just like you, whenever I attempt to use them for some intellectual work it proves to be a huge waste of time and the old manual hunt for information and DIY approach is much more effective.

I know a lot of people leverage gpt for basic writing tasks. I'm confident in my writing ability and enjoy writing so I don't use it for that either.

I might try using image models at some point to generate some pixel art, but on the whole I've found these tools pretty useless and am left wondering what I'm missing. To me it seems like they only work for a very specific case: "I have no background knowledge in domain X and am ok with a quick solution that is adequate but likely not optimal, and I don't need to worry about about correctness." Unfortunately, that's completely out of the realm of the sort of work I like to do.

I have used it at the very beginning but I've been mostly disappointed aside of few examples.

Things it proved useful for:

- learning new programming languages and solving hackerrank or codewars katas in languages I didn't know. It sped up and lowered my learning curve.

- writing recommendation letters based on my inputs ("write a recommendation letter for X, knowing those are his strengths and what he's good at).

Things it proved terrible for:

- personal assistant. I was hoping to use ChatGPT as a tool that would help me reason. I did try to use it as a companion learning the new Epic Games programming language "Verse". ChatGPT proved absolutely terrible for this task. I would feed him paragraphs about verse calculus, from the pdf and then question him about what I fed him, but have few exchanges more and he would start allucinating.

- text editing. I tried to feed him paragraphs and then tell him, modify this or that. But it's capped in the number of tokens and it would make mistakes. Say I told him "modify this line", he would reprint it, but if I told him "hey, so what's paragraph 2", again he would get stale versions

- calendar assistant. I would tell him what my priorities and appointments where but it was very unhelpful to provide help and required much too much interaction.

In the end I just stopped using it, besides few niche use cases (which haven't happened recently) it just does not provide value where I want to find this value: as an assistant.

I'm still moderately optimistic about such use cases being a reality in the future, because the idea of having a companion I can converse with about my daily tasks and work tasks (sort of a jarvis) is really where I expect to find value.

Where I don't expect it to provide value is overhyped things like google or bing search, there I want to find websites.