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I'd rather read the prompt

claytonwramsey.com

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Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#201

Post by _qswe »

palata wrote: post #191
_qswe wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making a weirdly uncharitable assumption. I'm referring to information which I largely or entirely wrote myself, or which I otherwise have proprietary access to, not which I randomly cherry-picked from scattershot Google results. Synthesizing large amounts of information into smaller more focused outputs is something LLMs happen to excel at. Doing the exact same work more slowly by hand just to prove a point t…

> Doing the exact same work more slowly by hand just to prove a point to someone on HN isn't a productive way to deliver business value. You prove my point again: it's not "just to prove a point". It's about internalising the information, improving your ability to synthesise and be critical. Sure, if your only objective is to "deliver business value", maybe you make more money by being uninteresting with an LLM. My p…

Understanding or being interesting has nothing to do with it. We use calculators and computers for a reason. No one hires people to respond to API requests by hand; we run the code on servers. Using the right tool for the job is just doing my job well.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#202

Post by SoftTalker »

necovek wrote: post #50
sillysaurusx wrote: post #22

I think people who don’t like writing shouldn’t be forced to write, just like people who don’t like music shouldn’t be forced to play music. Ditto for math. Forcing people to do these things supposedly results in a better, more competitive society. But does it really? Would you rather have someone on your team who did math because it let them solve problems efficiently, or did math because it’s the trick to get the r…

"Forcing" is a bit strong IMHO — I believe we've instead lost track of what is "passable", and everyone in higher education should be able to reach that and score a passing grade (D? C?). Maybe professors are too stringent with their evaluation, or maybe they are not good at teaching people what a passable writing style is, or maybe students simply don't want to accept that if they don't excel at writing, a D or a C…

In most schools a D is not passing or at least doesn’t count as credit towards graduation. I’m not really sure what the point of that grade is to be honest.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#203

Post by egglemonsoup »

laurentlb wrote: post #127

There are many ways to use LLMs. The issue, IMO, is that some people throw in a one-shot, short prompt, and get a generic, boring output. "Garbage in, generic out." Here's how I actually use LLMs: - To dump my thoughts and get help organizing them. - To get feedback on phrasing and transitions (I'm not a native speaker). - To improve tone, style (while trying to keep it personal!), or just to simplify messy sentences…

FWIW: Your original comment, in the first message you sent ChatGPT, was way better than the one you posted. Simple, authentic, to the point

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#204

Post by [deleted] »

ponector wrote: post #199
necovek wrote: post #54

I've already asked a number of colleagues at work producing insane amount of gibberish with LLMs to just pass me the prompt instead: if LLM can produce verbose text with limited input, I just need that concise input too (the rest is simply made up crap).

Chatgpt very useful for adding softness and politeness to my sentences. Would you like more straight forward text which probably will be rude for regular american?

[deleted]

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#205

Post by Herring »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #174
Herring wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience Gemini can be really good at creative writing, but yes you have to prompt and edit it very carefully (feeding ideas, deleting ideas, setting tone, conciseness, multiple drafts, etc). https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1andqk8/gemini...

I use Gemini pretty much exclusively for creative writing largely because the long context lets you fit an entire manuscript plus ancillary materials, so it can serve as a solid beta reader, and when you ask it to outline a chapter it is very good at taking the events preceding and following into account. It's hard to overstate the value of having a decent beta reader that can iteratively review your entire work in s…

Interesting. I think I'm a better editor so I use it as a writer, but it makes sense that it works the other way too for strong writers. Your way might even be better, since evaluating a text is likely easier than constructing a good text (Which is why your process worked even back with 3.5).

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#206

Post by sillysaurusx »

vunderba wrote: post #31
bost-ty wrote: post #4

I like the author's take: it isn't a value judgement on the individual using ChatGPT (or Gemini or whichever LLM you like this week), it's that the thought that went into making the prompt is, inevitably, more interesting/original/human than the output the LLM generates afterwards. In my experiments with LLMs for writing code, I find that the code is objectively garbage if my prompt is garbage. If I don't know what I…

This is the CRUX of the issue. Even with SOTA models (Sonnet 3.5, etc) - the more open-ended your prompt - the more banal and generic the response. It's GIGO turtles all the way down. I pointed this out a few weeks ago with respect to why the current state of LLMs will never make great campaign creators in Dungeons and Dragons. We as humans don't need to be "constrained" - ask any competent writer to sit quietly and…

Temperature 1.0 results are awful regardless of domain. 0.7 to 0.8 is the sweet spot. No one seems to believe this till they see for themselves.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#208

Post by justinclift »

chmod775 wrote: post #196
musicale wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> comprehensive documentation Documentation is an interesting use case. There are various kinds of documentation (reference, tutorial, architecture, etc.) and LLMs might be useful for things like - repetitive formatting and summarization of APIs for reference - tutorials which repeat the same information verbosely in an additive, logical sequence (though probably a human would be better) - sample code (though human-w…

Yes, but none of the current LLMs are even remotely useful doing that kind of work for even something moderately complex. I have a 2k LOC project that no LLM even "understands" *. They can't grasp what it is: It's a mostly react-compatible implementation of "hooks" to be used for a non-DOM application. Every code assistant thinks it's a project using React. Any documentation they write at best re-states what is immed…

I've found "Claude 3.7 Sonnet (Thinking)" to be pretty good at moderately complex code bases, after going through the effort to get it to be thorough.

Without that effort it's a useless sycophant and is functionally extremely lazy (ie takes short cuts all the time).

Don't suppose you've tried that particular model, after getting it to be thorough?

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#209

Post by valenterry »

musicale wrote: post #141
jsheard wrote: post #74

I'm far from the first to make this observation but LLMs are like anti-compression algorithms when used like that, a simple idea gets expanded into a bloated mess by an LLM, then sent to someone else who runs it through another LLM to summarize it back to something approximating the original prompt. Nobody benefits aside from Sam Altman and co, who get to pocket a cool $0.000000001 for enabling this pointless exercis…

> LLMs are like anti-compression algorithms when used like that, a simple idea gets expanded into a bloated mess by an LLM, I think that's the answer: LLMs are primarily useful for data and text translation and reduction, not for expansion. An exception is repetitive or boilerplate text or code where a verbose format is required to express a small amount of information.

They are also useful for association. Imagine an LLM trained on documentation. Then you can retrieve info associated with your question.

This can go beyond just specific documentation but also include things like "common knowledge" which is what the other poster meant when they talked about "teaching you things".

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#210

Post by sarchertech »

staunton wrote: post #134
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots and lots of developers can't program at all. As in literally - can't write a simple function like "fizzbuzz" even if you let them use reference documentation. Many don't even know what a "function" even is. (Yes, these are people with developer jobs, often at "serious" companies.)

I've never met someone like that and don't believe the claim. Maybe you mean people who are bad at interviews? Or people whose job isn't actually programming? Or maybe "lots" means "at least one"? Or maybe they can strictly speaking do fizzbuzz, but are "in any case bad programmers"? If your claim is true, what do these people do all day (or, let's say, did before LLMs were a thing...)?

Yeah I’ve been doing this for a while now and I’ve never met an employed developer who didn’t know what a function is or couldn’t write a basic program.

I’ve met some really terrible programmers, and some programmers who freeze during interviews.

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