Ask HN: I don't use AI. What exactly am I missing out on?

I still use ~Google~ Kagi for some searches (people, addresses, items to buy), but ChatGPT is a very different tool for me, and is a regular part of my life now. Some examples.

- My kid's sports schedule is in a table on the school's site. Paste it into chatgpt, give it a few handling rules, and ask for the contents of an .ics file back. Now I have everything in my calendar.

- A job posting looked interesting but I couldn't figure out what the company actually did. Pasted their website copy into chatgpt, asked for an ELI5, and had a five minute conversation, after which I could convincingly answer the "why us?" interview question.

- I haven't done math problems in a long time, so when my kid needs help with something that's totally unfamiliar to me, I can paste a photo of his worksheet into chatgpt and ask for an explanation, and after a few minutes I know enough to help him.

A couple things I've used LLMs for:

1. Learning new things - with interactive feedback. While there's a risk of hallucination, genereally for basic concepts on the undergraduate level, the proprietary models (eg. ChatGPT/GPT4) are generally pretty solid. For example, last year, I spent quite a bit of time asking ChatGPT about how the Federal Reserve works, and how it relates to interest rates. The benefit over plain old Google search is that I could ask much more precise questions than what Google searches would give me. You could check your understanding by confirming with the model whether a statement you make is correct. The feedback is invaluable.

2. Miscellaneous language tasks. Language models, unsurprisingly, excel at languages. It can do translation, rephrasing sentences or paragraphs (eg. make it more polite, casual, etc.), and generally converting sloppy writing into impeccable, grammatically correct, fluent prose. (And yes the larger models can even make anything rhyme if you ask them to.) More often though, when I need to express an idea but just couldn't think of the precise word, I can just ask ChatGPT for 10 words that have a similar meaning, and usually I'll get the word that I want.

3. As a coding assistant -- don't use ChatGPT for that, use a solution that integrates with your IDE/editor, and use it as coding autocomplete. It can help you write the (simple) functions you don't bother to write, and even though it usually fails at writing complicated things, sometimes the scaffolding reduces the amount of typing needed. And even if you don't trust the code it generates, you can use it to automatically generate comments and test cases.

I do agree it's probably not great if you think of it as a pocket search engine. LLMs have been called "a blurry JPEG of the web", you probably want to actually check info on the web rather than an inferior substitute.

You are missing 100x productivity gains if you are an elite engineer.

It's a rubber duck that never gets tired and is available all of the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

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