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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?

#101

Post by pylua »

joshuanapoli wrote: post #43
pylua wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having a bunch of different one off templates sounds like much more of a maintenance problem over a long enough period.

Would be better to ask ai to generate the templating library.

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

#102

Post by pylua »

jwestbury wrote: post #72
james-revisoai wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its helpful to do boilerplate in languages or legacy code you touch less often, e.g. React class components. But also, it can reasonably set types for the inputs of say a React component, just based on an example (made up) usage of some props you give it. And you can even, if you are very uncouth, simply generate the sensible props for a certain kind of object given a description by say the user. It can do things lik…

I mentioned this elsewhere yesterday, but I've used it to do things like stub out an API -- I tell it what I'm making, what endpoints I think I need, and ask if there's anything obvious I'm missing. Sometimes it gives me some ideas for additional endpoints. Then it implements stubs for every endpoints and all the associated code and I'm ready to start adding actual logic. There are sometimes tools available for this,…

Stubbing out endpoints is not usually a task that takes a long time and usually the code is auto generated from a mechanism like openapi.

I could see it generating out an openapi file but there are already so many templates out there to start from it does not make sense to use ai for this, in my opinion.

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

#103

Post by pylua »

mike_hearn wrote: post #85

I'm using it in three ways on a current project to reduce admin overhead for my company: 1. I've written a program that reconciles all my invoices against bank/cc transactions at the end of each quarter. My accountant otherwise has to do this by hand. It uses OpenAI's APIs to read the PDFs, parse out the invoicing party and amount(s), and as a fallback when classical NLP fails to parse dates. 2. I used GPT-4 to help…

1) what if it makes a mistake, and you get audited ? Could this be construed as negligent ?

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

#104

Post by pylua »

I have to say, I love chat gpt. I use it primarily to learn new frame works and to understand apis I have never worked with before. I also use it to help decipher error messages that I can’t find any help on. You can ask it very direct questions about any cloud stack or Unix detail.

That said, I can’t identify with a lot of the use cases here. They either seem to be a workaround for a non existing language feature or introduce a lot of liability.

I’m worried that ai may be promoting poor coding practices . IE the future of code is neither oop or functional, it is all just a copy pasta of chat gpt, endlessly and mindlessly chained together.

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

#105

Post by elicksaur »

CharlesW wrote: post #87
osigurdson wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Tip: it’s often faster to keep iterating on the problem with the LLM than to stop after the first response. “As an expert TypeScript programmer, you should know that X isn’t correct. Please try again.”

Sweet, now it is stuck in a loop where it says sorry, here’s a correction then spits out the same code. Do you have an example chat where that worked for you?

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

#106

Post by osigurdson »

elicksaur wrote: post #105
CharlesW wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tip: it’s often faster to keep iterating on the problem with the LLM than to stop after the first response. “As an expert TypeScript programmer, you should know that X isn’t correct. Please try again.”

Sweet, now it is stuck in a loop where it says sorry, here’s a correction then spits out the same code. Do you have an example chat where that worked for you?

An example that didn't work that I thought should was to implement a Base62 converter. I thought it would easily be able to do it as the problem is so well scoped (an probably even exists in its training set). However, it either had poor performance characteristics or wasn't correct.

This is how an experienced dev would like to work - break the problem down and hand off some of the more well scoped problems to AI.

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

#107

Post by ChatGTP »

LastTrain wrote: post #45
mtmail wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No, I was curious ?

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

#108

Post by ChatGTP »

pqdbr wrote: post #59
ChatGTP wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is a web developer managing their own servers in 2023?

Mainly cost. I also don't mind the insane performance of bare metal :) https://world.hey.com/dhh/we-have-left-the-cloud-251760fb

Ok I find it amazing it’s cheaper to host your own on bare metal ? I was also curious what type of stuff you’re building as a web developer ? Django ? Must be decent scale?

I host things on GCP which scale to zero in quiet times, they saved me a bunch of cash…

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

#109

Post by Nischalj10 »

MPSimmons wrote: post #53

Mostly to get around bad docs. I need to implement things using libraries, services, and APIs that aren't well documented, but the source code is public, and people have written code against them, and ChatGPT has read all of the things that I would read (and more) to get to the point where I can use it, so I just ask it. The 2021 knowledge limit is pretty annoying, since libraries change so often, but it's still very…

>Mostly to get around bad docs. I need to implement things using libraries, services, and APIs that aren't well documented, but the source code is public, and people have written code against them, and ChatGPT has read all of the things that I would read (and more) to get to the point where I can use it, so I just ask it. The 2021 knowledge limit is pretty annoying, since libraries change so often, but it's still very useful.

can you try this out and let me know your feedback? https://chat.collectivai.com

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

#110

Post by mike_hearn »

pylua wrote: post #103
mike_hearn wrote: post #85

I'm using it in three ways on a current project to reduce admin overhead for my company: 1. I've written a program that reconciles all my invoices against bank/cc transactions at the end of each quarter. My accountant otherwise has to do this by hand. It uses OpenAI's APIs to read the PDFs, parse out the invoicing party and amount(s), and as a fallback when classical NLP fails to parse dates. 2. I used GPT-4 to help…

1) what if it makes a mistake, and you get audited ? Could this be construed as negligent ?

The outcome is easy to check manually using the tool, my company isn't huge.

As for mistakes, that can happen with human processes too. Tax authorities are used to that possibility. Reconciliation is tedious and error prone. AI can do a better job than humans. Certainly the motivation for me to do it is to reduce the round-tripping between me and my accountant where he points out I've forgotten to submit things.

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