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Are you able to give a specific example of a problem it helped you solve? Especially one that you were at a complete blocking point, it provided some solution,

• usgroup 3y ago
  My experience is much the same, far from "I've essentially got 15-20 high-priced world-class consultants in every field that I chose to pull from, working at my beck and call..." that OP mentions. I suspect it is because I tend to have off piste questions which are not recipes or high-level ideas. It is where it'd be most useful to me, but it is at the same time where least training data is going to be. It is also where actual legitimate experts are most useful: the special sauce, not the meat and potatoes.
• razodactyl 3y ago
  Yeah I've been down the exact same paths as you. You're spot on, it's a statistical merge and "RAG" is literally "filter the probabilities and change the odds". The main argument is that you can give it a block of real-world data like an email or code and take advantage of collective knowledge to identify outliers like bugs, bad grammar or incoherent writing which translates exactly to code semantics too.
• jerpint 3y ago
  I had to implement a relatively simple auth flow recently for an app (something I haven’t done in the past). Gpt3.5 struggled to give me anything useful other than high level ideas but GPT4 gave me the exact boilerplate I needed and unblocked me. I had searched all over the web for an example addressing my specific use case on google and couldn’t find one. GPT4 produced a working example for me and got me past that road block. I also use it regularly to suggest better coding patterns and I find it does a really good job at doing code reviews for obvious mistakes / anti-patterns
  • mettamage 3y ago
    Yea, I have a very similar experience. ChatGPT unblocks me quickly in conceptual understanding when it comes to coding. My programming knowledge is pretty good, but in certain areas I had a hard time understanding something and just skipped it. Oauth is an example of this. ChatGPT unblocked me there as well and explained the theory behind it both in the abstract case and the case pertaining to my situation. So now it's much more clear. But my mind kind of works like: once I'm stuck I endlessly do my best to understand it, which sometimes mean that I grind to a halt. ChatGPT stops that entirely. The fact that it always produces 2 to 3 bugs is fine.
• jorl17 3y ago
  Not OP. Also, I generally detest hype culture and hated the Web3/Crypto bubble. I'm a SW who works as the CTO of a small startup studio, so I end up dealing with a lot of everything -- from coding, to managing and hiring people, to working on proposals and finding clients, you name it. I use ChatGPT 4, GPT-4, and Copilot every day. It is an "average intern" at many many things. Here's how I feel it helps me: * Its interactivity lets me learn a lot (superficially) about new topics. I can then expand that with research of my own * It helps me think outside the box or from other perspectives when thinking about e-mails, proposals, real-world scenarios * When exploring a new language, framework or technology, it points me in the right direction. * For quick scripts, using the code generation/analysis feature, if I direct it right (i.e. layout "the plan" beforehand and ask it to work the rest on its own), it gets a lot of it right pretty fast, saving me some time writing the code, figuring out the right libraries and the nitty-gritty details. * It is great at giving ideas for why something might not be working. Real things I've done with it: * Discuss ongoing negotiations with clients, trying to better my proposal and better understand the clients point of view. * Learn more about managerial or "business-y" topics, by allowing me to discuss things with it and iterate on that with my own research. It is a valuable "white board" to discuss with. * Adjust my e-mails so they are more appropriate to the situation. This can involve changing the tone, shortening them, adding more detail, etc. * In general, i've used it to find flaws in reasoning when dealing with people. For example, it has helped me question my own client proposals or approaches, by specifying where I was lacking (e.g. because I was vague, or pessimistic, didn't give a mensurable objective, seemed to ignore a client's request, etc) * I use a command-line utility from the shell which lets me ask it to do something and then have it do it. I now use this with some frequency to just write the commands I would have to google because I haven't memorized. Things like ffmpeg or imagemagick arguments. Or combinations of grep, sed, ls, find, git, etc. Here are some examples: i) "merge jpgs in this folder in order onto a pdf. each jpg should fill the page 100% without margin. Avoid complex calculations". ii) "zip this folder with maximum compression and password 12345678'". iii) "git remove branches matching pattern sprint-* remotely'" iv) "use imagemagick to convert to jpg lossless and rotate 90 deg clockwise ~/home-en.png" v) "Add _en before .jpg in all files in current directory. So they become _en.jpg" vi) The list goes on and on... * It has helped me cleanup nginx config files * I have thrown code at it which I suspect has a bug. With a bit of context and some back and forth, it has helped me find it. * In languages or frameworks I don't use often, it really shines. It has helped me write several applescript scripts which I have also cobbled together to create Alfred workflows. If I need to code something in a language I don't often use, what it produces is good enough for me to iterate on. * It has helped people at our company improve their copywriting (when used with a lot of care) * I have used it to help me critique my own poetry and improve how I approach poetry in general. Highly subjective, I know * When trying to figure out how to use apps I don't often use, or dealing with unexpected behaviour in them, it often helps me find the issue. Notable apps in this category include Photoshop and Excel. * I don't often do frontend so I'm particularly bad at styling and organizing things. When I ocasionally have to do frontend, it often gives me the initial "skeleton" very well. I have seen many people try to use these tools, and here's where I think they SHOULD NOT use them: * For facts, obviously -- which is unfortunately what many people actually try to use it for * For writing (without check) most of your e-mails our posts, especially with very little context * For ideas where you need "just enough creativity". It's a very fine line. Think brainstorming ideas for UI elements in a new website according to specific brand guidelines * For incredibly specific details or overly complex tasks. You can't often have it write your 200 line function out of thin-air! It is clear that GPT provides me with: 1. A better search engine, which skips past loads of outdated content or SEO-laden bullshit. It's just a shame that I can only use it this way for more specific "creative" or "problem-solving questions" questions. For important fact-based info, I always have to check what it says. 2. A partner with whom to discuss ideas and iterate over them, especially on topics I don't know. If anything, it's a great rubber-duck 3. A way to forget the underpinning of some of what I do and approach it with natural language. I find myself asking it to write my bash sequences instead of thinking them up myself. Of course I check them and 99.9% understand them, but it's just so much easier to have it do it for me. 4. (Copilot is an upgrade of my IDE. And a great one!) If modern Google (and Bing and everyone else?) weren't so shit, I wouldn't need 1. To this day I still first go to google, eventually give up because it doesn't answer me properly and then go to GPT. It's ridiculous. I think 1. brings a lot of value to many many people. Google is so absolutely shit nowadays I can't believe it -- and the more I use GPT to get a comparison baseline, the more I am shocked. 2., 3. and 4. are incredible additions to my workflow. I truly believe we are heading in the direction of interacting with computers via a new interface. Even writing code might eventually be affected. Perhaps, like we have built high-level languages on top lower-level languages and machine code, abstraction over abstraction, we might end up with some form of language writing which uses (very well controlled) LLM technology under the hood. Instead of directly writing the code, we tell it to write it. We still need to be smart to pick the right algorithms and structures, but no longer have to worry so much about writing the nitty-gritty syntax or details. Maybe? Using GPT is its own art. Crafting the right prompts and getting a feel for how it works is very important. It is also essential to have critical-thinking and know when to question what it says and when not to. A friend of mine told me this: "The companies who strive on hiring loads of shit people to do work are the ones who will suffer more. The others, which have hired smart people capable of critical-thinking, will benefit. GPT obliviates the work of many small shit people. Pair GPT with someone who is already smart and has very good problem-solving or critical-thinking skills, and now you've got a team that can obliterate the teams of many small resources. I don't know if OpenAI will succeed or not, but I do know this technology is absolutely life-changing for many, and going back to a world without it being this acessible will likely be a net-negative.
• kubiton 3y ago
  I used it yesterday to generate a basic layout with image and input field based on tailwindcss. Would have taken me much more time to figure it out than what chatgpt did at first try.
• lucideer 3y ago
  > Are you able to give a specific example of a problem it helped you solve? Especially one that you were at a complete blocking point... I think it's worth stepping back here and re-examining the hurdles your setting for your own understanding. The essential question here is: is ChatGPT useful to people. What you seem to be implying with your question is: I will not use ChatGPT unless it can solve problems with X level of difficulty for me. Why have you set that pre-requisite? Would it not still be useful to you if it simply increased the efficiency of solving simple day-to-day tasks that you're not blocked on?
  • tdeck 3y ago
    I'm not the OP but I had a similar set of experiences with ChatGPT so I find the discussion useful. Essentially I already know how to find what I need using a search engine, and I know how to use cues from the source material to judge if it's correct. When I try using ChatGPT for technical problems I face, I frequently get hallucinated answers that feel like a waste of time. Then I go on HN and read these paeans from other technologists who say ChatGPT has completely changed how they work and is 10x better than using Google. I'd like to have that too! I just don't get it, it doesn't match my experience at all. And yes I did try the paid ChatGPT model for a month.
    • bmitc 3y ago
      > Then I go on HN and read these paeans from other technologists who say ChatGPT has completely changed how they work and is 10x better than using Google. I'd like to have that too! I just don't get it, it doesn't match my experience at all. This is exactly my experience and what I am trying to get at. I start feeling that maybe I'm missing out, so I go give it a try. My direct experience shows that it spits out gibberish, but then people say things like it's a godsend but don't give any examples besides maybe it generated some HTTP API requests for them.
      • avbjdkleosm698 3y ago
        I think there are really people that have jobs where they mostly write the same http request code all day everyday and then go home. Especially in the web space and startup world. ChatGPT isn't optimized for us, it was designed for the JavaScript tutorial audience that somehow have remained gainfully employed.
• mliker 3y ago
  With chatgpt I’ve been able to generate math 2d and 3d animations in just 1-2hr with no background nor prior knowledge. I was also able to use it to generate software to check the blockchain to gather data I needed, again with no experience using the blockchain client libraries
  • bmitc 3y ago
    > With chatgpt I’ve been able to generate math 2d and 3d animations in just 1-2hr with no background nor prior knowledge. Can you give some example prompts that will reproduce such an experience?
    • deleted 3y ago
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• kdwikzncba 3y ago
  If you look at his profile and history, it seems what's he does is mostly to parse jsons and generate config files.
• chrisallenlane 3y ago
  In my experience, it's more helpful in some areas than others. This year I used GPT-4 to write a significant amount of Terraform that was necessary to migrate an application onto AWS. Writing Terraform, in my opinion, is problem that's broad but shallow. GPT-4 needed to do little beyond summarize documentation, but it was able to do so competently, and that was hugely valuable to me. Conversely: In my free time, I've attempted to use it for a game-development side-project, and very little of its output has been useful at all.
• superhuzza 3y ago
  I feed ChatGPT 3.5 answers from surveys and it summarizes and categorizes the answers for me. I have a quick read through as well to be sure, but I've been very impressed so far. It's a massive timesaver when doing a lot of research. I can also feed it a list of web accessibility issues and have it sort the list into most/least critical, along with providing references to the specific WCAG criteria. It has occasionally stumbled on this task, but again massive timesavings. I also use ChatGPT for filler text in designs. Yes I have to build on what it writes, but it's way better and quicker than what I'd do myself. I know our communications team is doing this x10 more than I am.
• gilthans 3y ago
  I can give two personal examples: 1) I needed to display a very high resolution image to a user. I have experience in GIS and imagery, so I knew I should use an image pyramid in some way, and from previous experience assumed I needed some server to cleverly serve the tiles. But I didn't want to implement it myself, and googling 'map server' led to rabbit holes. I consulted with chatGPT, and while it gave me several fake solutions, eventually it suggested using gdal2tiles.py to create the pyramid and then serve it directly with a CDN. This never occurred to me, and is a much better fit to this problem. This saved a LOT of time (on either building my own server or fudging with other solutions) 2) I have a streamlit service, and needed to use some of my infra inside, infra that was written using async-await. Unfortunately, streamlit and asyncio don't play nice together (boo streamlit). I went to chatGPT hoping it would find me a way to make it work anyway, and after trying everything it suggested (which failed), I tried googling myself, and spent several days without a solution. Eventually, I went back to chatGPT and it suggested building a small HTTP service that would serve the results, and access it in streamlit using requests, no async-await required. It's a hacky solution, but significantly faster than reimplementing my streamlit dashboard in another framework or rewriting my infra without async-await. It saved loads of time. I think you'd agree these aren't junior level issues. ChatGPT definitely didn't solve every problem I came to it with, probably not even most, and even when it did I had to intervene signficantly. I feel the more experienced you are as a developer, the less valuable it is. But when you need to tinker in a field you're not proficient at, or if you need to brainstorm a solution to a tricky problem, it can be a great tool. I understand why many swear by it. It takes a while to learn what sort of issues are good to turn to chatGPT with and which aren't, and also how to phrase those issues
• ghshephard 3y ago
  Random example from today - we have a new product being deployed from a prominent vendor, and they started running into a ton of "out of socket" errors. This product was important to one of our telemetry organizations Q4 OKRs, and they weren't getting traction with the vendor, so they started reaching out internally. I got tagged as someone with a background in networking (though this was clearly not a networking issue) - and started poking around. The first thing that comes to mind of course, is file descriptions, but ulimit -n returned a massive number and "ss -a" showed there were a tiny number of sockets opened (like, 1300 - we have lots of nodes with 500K+ sockets opened - so this really didn't feel like a node or docker container issue). So - I just reached out to Chat, and we started going back and forth, starting with "In linux, how many open sockets can there be at a time?". What's nice, about that wide open question, is you don't get a single answer, instead you get a briefing on Linux Sockets. File Descriptors, sure, but also memory, port range, TCP/IP stack limits, etc... It starts to lay out a roadmap towards solving the issue, answering the question you were interested in, rather than the one you asked. I do a bit of back and forth on some scenarios, asking about /proc, and ss, etc.. seeing if I can track anything else out. And then, after spending about 5 minutes, and building context, I ask it "Is there anything else that can cause an error regarding too many sockets with low socket use" - at which point it lays out a number of scenarios, one of which is FD_SETSIZE. So - we dig into FD_SETSIZE, and immediately that looks interesting - it's the limit that you can use with a select() call, and, even better, I get recommendations to use POLL or EPOLL (which anyone who has ever straced has seen a ton of). I ask it how to determine FD_SETSIZE, discover it's 1024 on the client, which matches our low socket count, confirm that we should never increase the size of FD_SETSIZE, check the vendor code, see they've got it hard configured to talk with select() instead of poll - we recommend they give us a new build with poll() defined - and voila - problem goes away. On to the next issue. Where Chat excels is not in solving or completing anything, or, in fact, even being correct 100% of the time (it clearly isn't) - but it's an endlessly enthusiastic savant intern - frequently wrong in hilarious ways, but always willing to dig in and pull on technical threads and come up with things that I can try with a bunch of rapid iterations, and close off an issue. It's willingness to write code that is 90% correct just reduces the time, and cognitive load of constantly having to do it all yourself.
  • 3y ago
• aprdm 3y ago
  I think this speaks to the bubble you're in and how your kind of software development probably represents 0.1% of what's out there. I don't even know what WebGPU, Warren Abstract machine or "whatever is that you're trying to do" is. I've been doing dev for ~20 years now, most of the work out there is essentially plumbing events/databases/REST APIs/regexes/JSON/configs/ web UIs in existing and well established frameworks/tools to solve business problems. You likely work more R&D style environments, which again, probably represent a very low % of devs out there
  • singron 3y ago
    The parent comment claimed they had the value of 15-20 high priced world class consultants from every field, but this makes it seem like it does only the most basic common tasks.
    • bmitc 3y ago
      Agreed. I asked it things I actually need help with, not relatively mundane tasks that are easily accomplished by reading documentation. And the fact that it answers so confidently and yet wrong concerns me.
      • deleted 3y ago
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    • ad404b8a372f2b9 3y ago
      I've never met a consultant who seemed useful and I've met many from the big 4 so in that regard GPT measures up.
  • sangnoir 3y ago
    > I think this speaks to the bubble you're in and how your kind of software development probably represents 0.1% of what's out there. Grandparent specifically said they find ChatGPT useful for things outside their wheelhouse: >> [...]troubleshooting situations that flow into me - working in areas that I have the slimmest of backgrounds in It sounds to me like it may not be safe to use ChatGPT if you can't check its work.
• gaganyaan 3y ago
  Are you using GPT-3.5 or GPT-4? A hallucination like FableGL sounds like 3.5, which is not something you should base your expectations of the tech on. Also, although I haven't seen it before, the Warren Abstract Machine seems like too big of a job for GPT-4. It excels at smaller tasks such as "Convert this C code to idiomatic Rust", or "Write a SQL query that grabs records from X, joins with Y, filters by Z". You might need to make small adjustments manually or by saying "Rewrite it with this in mind". One really neat trick it did recently is that I uploaded a chart png I found on the internet, and asked it to write Seaborn code that matched the chart's style. It took ~3 follow-up tweak prompts, but then spat out code that worked. It also handles things like "How do I adjust this label that's positioned in chart coordinates over by 10 pixels?", which is an absolute pain to figure out from the docs. Especially since you're getting answers noting the complexity, I think you're just asking too much of it for now. Try smaller tasks for now, and wait a while to try the big ones again.
  • xigoi 3y ago
    > A hallucination like FableGL sounds like 3.5, which is not something you should base your expectations of the tech on. So in order to properly evaluate a service, we need to already be subscribed to it in the first place?
    • falleng0d 3y ago
      Yes. Or just use the api and pay for usage (but in that case It could also get more complicated since you have full control)
  • gloosx 3y ago
    So funny SQL query example, do you realize you could describe your exact query to the engine itself in the more precise and short terms? Writing "select X from Y where Z join XX" seems much more practical and rational than using this whole sentence "Write a SQL query that grabs records from X, joins with Y, filters by Z" to achieve the same.
• wenc 3y ago
  I'm using ChatGPT 4 (paid) and it has solved a few problems for me. (it sounds like you're using the free 3.5 and also having some pretty unrealistic expectations of ChatGPT like asking for a full implementation of a WAM) A mundane one: I have a list of lat-longs mapped to region codes, and I needed write a query to find the area of the convex hull of each region code. I knew how to do it in code, but I wanted a SQL answer. ChatGPT gave me the correct Redshift SQL. A more involved one: I needed to maximize match x people y groups, where people can rank their choices up to 3, but as soon as they accept the match, they drop out of the pool. Plus a bunch of different constraints. Sounds like a stable marriage problem. ChatGPT proposed the Gale-Shapley algorithm, which was the exact one I was looking for.
• slau 3y ago
  One of my clients has their own instance of ChatGPT running. It is running on dedicated hardware, is trained on different data, and we can change the core prompts with relative ease. We even get to tune some temperature coefficient, which adjusts whether the LLM behaves in a creative or factual way. This is because the client in question is in a regulated industry. This week, we used it a bunch of times to help rephrase objectives while working in brainstorm sessions, allowing it absorb ridiculously large regulatory PDFs to give us summaries and ideas of what our greenfield project should focus on.
  • pinkgolem 3y ago
    Be careful, not sure what you are self hosting there but the last paragraph sounds like a good way to start working on a task the LLM imagined
• nuancebydefault 3y ago
  I'm surprised that nobody on HN seems to point to or mention bing chat. It is based on GPT, it is much better than free GPT 3.5 and it is free as well. I use it plenty of times and more than 90 percent of the time answers are exact and code just works as is. You just ask it extra questions about how it works and it explains it in as much detail as you possibly need, until you fully understand. Then you ask it to rewrite it this or that way and you try it out and add features step by step. Works like a charm.
  • GianFabien 3y ago
    Until your comment, I had been using Chat GPT 3.5. Not only is Bing Chat more accurate (GPT 4 based) but it also provides footnotes to allow you to reference the sources for more specific information. The code snippets tend to be bloated, but no worse than an intern would produce. A quick refactor, adding edge case handling and the code is ready to test and commit.
    • seydor 3y ago
      You can also upload pdfs to it
• sigbottle 3y ago
  Well, the things you're working on don't sound like things that I'd feed to chatGPT. But if I need to look up some language feature, or write some basic boilerplate code, for example, it's a big time saver. If it's something that will take mental energy to generate, but I can verify in a few seconds before adding to my project, it's good. I wouldn't ask it to code any algorithms for example, but syntax/language feature stuff and API gluing it can pattern match pretty well. TL;DR don't ask it anything to do with logic, but anything to do with documentation and stuff like that it's pretty good
• paulcole 3y ago
  I don’t need it to solve problems where I’m completely stuck for it to be worth $20 a month. Things I’ve gotten value out of in the past week or two: • Writing a job description • Making a python script to automate some stuff in Asana • Simplifying some management concepts so I could slack them to a coworker All of these are things I could easily do myself. But with ChatGPT, they’re done 75% as well in 10% of the time and I don’t have to think hardly at all.
  • fullsend 3y ago
    This is the sort of stuff I use it for all the time, great examples. Or summarizing new concepts, reformatting strings or tables quickly, asking what some strange code snippet might be doing.
• bastawhiz 3y ago
  Not that I'm trying to change your mind, but some specific things that LLMs do for me: - Helping to refactor SQL - writing jq commands (I simply cannot) - writing shell code (it happens just infrequently enough that I can't justify spending the time to get good) - brainstorming names or puns. Word association is easier with a second person (or an LLM) - figuring out why my AWS CLI commands aren't doing what I'm expecting them to be doing - asking for reasons why a piece of code wouldn't work I can competently do all of these things on my own if I havw to, but now I don't have to do them on my own so my life is easier.
  • badpun 3y ago
    This is just helping out with trivial tasks, which sounds very much in scope of LLMs. The OP was talking about replacing "world class consultants", which I'm very sceptical of.
    • rmilejczz 3y ago
      I use it almost exclusively to help me approach novel problems, or at least problem spaces that I am severely lacking expertise in. It’s pretty incredible for helping me leverage my extant programming knowledge to accomplish things that I couldn’t before due to being blocked by research. I’ve also used it quite a lot for advice as I was learning project management and moving away from individual contributions. So I think as a consultant it has value, though I think “world class” might be a bit hyperbolic, since I still need to validate its output.
      • bmitc 3y ago
        > I use it almost exclusively to help me approach novel problems, or at least problem spaces that I am severely lacking expertise in. It’s pretty incredible for helping me leverage my extant programming knowledge to accomplish things that I couldn’t before due to being blocked by research. Can you expand on this? This is what I'd like to use it for, but I don't ever have any experience remotely close to helpful. The typical response is just something like "that's complicated but here's some gibberish that tries to show a simple example but is still wrong in ways it's not useful at all". Do you have a specific example?
• tomjen3 3y ago
  I prompted it with “what is wrong with this code” and my broken sql and it told me exactly what was wrong. I could have looked up the individual parts and found the problems myself, but then I would have spent at least 15 minutes on it instead of 30 seconds.