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Ask HN: How do you use AI to get things done faster?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you use AI to get things done faster?

#41

Post by yoav »

yoav wrote: post #36
bamboozled wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is wildly more efficient than talking with a human where I have the overhead of social dynamics and navigating their communication quirks. I can see that this was beneficial for you, which is nice. I can also see this being a huge, huge problem for team dynamics. Didn't like talking to people before? Well now you never have to again! You can go off on your own and generate entire new architectures, codebases, wh…

I’m an introvert. I previously only used writing long notes to myself to think before engaging with a coworker. Now I’ve unlocked “voice without social dynamics” to do that which is a whole other dimension. Team dynamics now for extroverts mean instead of waisting and hour of phone time for them to slowly talk through basic ideas and catch up to the introverts who could prepare for the meeting on their own, now extro…

I’m also looking forward to having voice gpt participate in zoom calls to cut the extroverts off when they’re dragging on their out loud thinking so we can all move the call forward.

As an introvert i find it difficult to cut someone off mid thought because I assume like me everything they say is well thought through and important. I can’t guage when it is and when it’s just stream of consciousness from them until they’re finished and yield the floor and by then it’s too late.

the current status quo of “this meeting could have been an email” or “could have just read and commented on my doc instead of waisting an hour of ten people’s time” is not good for team dynamics or morale. And we finally have a solve for it

Re: Ask HN: How do you use AI to get things done faster?

#42

Post by l72 »

Here are some of the things I have used ChatGPT for:

# Writing

- I've had it rewrite some of my blog posts to give them more style

- I've asked it to help me with some business letters

- Rewriting my letters to city counselors state / state legislatures

# Admin

- Explaining some parameters for NetworkManager

- Helping me figure out why my rewrite rules in an .htaccess file weren't working as expected

- Asking questions about different versions of PEM certificates and using openssl to convert them

- Restoring some software RAID arrays with lvm

- Journalctl filter options

- ffmpeg commands

# Coding

- I was working on a side project in a new language (to me) using Vala and Gtk4. ChatGPT was mostly wrong on everything, but sometimes lead me in a useful direction.

- Generally I haven't found ChatGPT useful for my work coding

# Other

- Explanations on Double Entry Accounting

- Guidelines on helping my sister talk to her 3 year old out expressing empathy for their dog

- Writing Haikus for my wife. This was an interesting back and forth where ChatGPT starting asking me more questions about my spouse, our relationship, hobbies, and so on.

- Help writing personalized Dad jokes for a father's day card

- An examination looking at the imperialism/militarism in Star Trek from the point of view of the Federation and from the point of view of the other society

- Questions about recipes (replacing items, using fresh items instead of canned/jarred)

Overall, I've found coding to be the least successful aspect of ChatGTP (granted I'm still using 3.5). Possibly, this is because I tend to use less popular languages (work is all elixir/erlang). But even trying to do some python/pytorch work, I found it constantly gave answers that didn't actually work.

However, I have found it really great for explaining topics. It can give pretty good metaphors and you can have it explain its answers. I've also found it being really helpful in writing. I think I am usually able to express my idea clearly and organize my thoughts, but my writing style is very pedestrian. ChatGPT is able to take my outlines and fill them in with my desired style quite well.

Re: Ask HN: How do you use AI to get things done faster?

#43

Post by joshuanapoli »

pylua wrote: post #20
keyle wrote: post #8

ChatGPT (plus) helps me every day with boilerplate code or even finding off by 1 bugs and small things like that. Sometimes I also ask it to rewrite something clearer, or add some comments sparingly. Copilot can get really aggressive. Sometimes it's right there, "what I was thinking about! Woo! magic!" And sometimes, it's like "OMG let me hit the return key". So I often turn it off and forget it's off for a week... B…

One thing I am confused about is using ai for boiler plate code . Shouldn’t that be a macro or code generated, or even an aspect ? Having large snippets of ai generated code outside of a macro or code generation tool does not make any sense .

Probably yes… but making and maintaining good templates is hard. It doesn’t get done because probably the person who needs to make the template is different than the user of it.

So the AI gets the benefit of having a template without the trouble of getting someone to make and maintain each one.

Re: Ask HN: How do you use AI to get things done faster?

#44

Post by elicksaur »

If you’re coming to this thread to say how great or how terrible it is, can you share a positive or negative example use? So much of these discussions is people talking past each other because the interactions with the product are non-public and siloed, but at least with ChatGPT, chats are easily shareable!

Re: Ask HN: How do you use AI to get things done faster?

#45

Post by LastTrain »

mtmail wrote: post #29
Mekulpa wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cost? Persude of knowledge? Why do you ask a question like this on a hacker news forum? Start being more curious!

> Start being more curious! The user was curious and asked a question.

C’mon. It was a judgement in the form of a facetious question - even ChatGPT could recognize that.

Re: Ask HN: How do you use AI to get things done faster?

#46

Post by awestroke »

leonheld wrote: post #16

It's a bit surprising seeing all the positive replies to this thread. In my experience (using GPT-3), the time I spend debugging the code generated by the AI is almost the same as if I was to write it correctly in one go. The comprehension aspect kinda helps me sometimes, like when I need to understand some obscure shell script.

Use GPT4

Re: Ask HN: How do you use AI to get things done faster?

#47

Post by l72 »

l72 wrote: post #42

Here are some of the things I have used ChatGPT for: # Writing - I've had it rewrite some of my blog posts to give them more style - I've asked it to help me with some business letters - Rewriting my letters to city counselors state / state legislatures # Admin - Explaining some parameters for NetworkManager - Helping me figure out why my rewrite rules in an .htaccess file weren't working as expected - Asking questio…

Also, if I have a question, I no longer use a general search engine, and instead go straight to ChatGPT.

Re: Ask HN: How do you use AI to get things done faster?

#48

Post by jfdi »

It’s eliminated a mental barrier to building products where I was worried before I had limited time to work and needed to focus on things that drew from existing familiarity.

Now I’m able to focus on the product/outcome even if what’s involved is outside what I’m familiar with and at least get started building.

The net effect has been I can build a wider variety of things in a wider variety of tooling with more enjoyment and less drudgery.

- text summaries

- sysadmin stuff

- debugging stuff

- boilerplate stuff

- unblocking writers block

- integrating disparate stacks

- data transformation and algorithm stuff

- most marketingy stuff: copy, images, campaign/activations

Re: Ask HN: How do you use AI to get things done faster?

#49

Post by osigurdson »

ibbih wrote: post #28
leonheld wrote: post #16

It's a bit surprising seeing all the positive replies to this thread. In my experience (using GPT-3), the time I spend debugging the code generated by the AI is almost the same as if I was to write it correctly in one go. The comprehension aspect kinda helps me sometimes, like when I need to understand some obscure shell script.

Use GPT-4.

I use GPT-4 and still have problems getting it to write simple code correctly sometimes. I find it immensely useful in many areas but writing actual detailed code doesn't seem to be a game changing use case for me (yet).

Re: Ask HN: How do you use AI to get things done faster?

#50

Post by epiccoleman »

I think to get good value out of it you really have to get a sense for what it's good for and what it's not.

I don't have it write my day to day code, because that's complicated and usually niche enough that it's not likely to give a good result.

But it's awesome for something like writing a quick and dirty shell script. most recently I needed to bulk rename 50 or so files with an interactive piece for a special case. I described the operation to GPT and it spit out a nearly perfect shell script. Could I have written the same script in half an hour? Yes, but it was sure nice not to have to.

I also like it for just bouncing around an idea. Recently I was thinking about writing a program to make a midi device from a guitar hero controller, and I was able to get a good sense of the available APIs / libs in a few different languages with a 3 minute back and forth with GPT. Again, I could have easily searched around myself and come to the same answer, but removing the friction is pretty nice.

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