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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

I have heard widely varying opinions on how useful ChatGPT is. Could some people who have had good experiences with it share the details of what they do, so that we could figure out what the differences are between the effective and ineffective usecases?

For example, I hear some people say that it is great at code synthesis, but in my experience it goes completely off the rails if you ask it to write something that's even a little bit unlikely in the training corpus.

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I use it for work (C# programmer), and I find it useful. It won't invent new algorithms for you, or do math, but I find it useful for the following things:

* Coming up with design patterns given instructions on what I want to accomplish.

* Generating skeleton code.

* Code review up to a point (it's often wrong, but also give valid suggestions)

* Generating C# documentation comments for methods and classes.

* Generating in-code comments (i.e. //)

* API naming ideas (classes, methods)

* Giving me names of algorithms that I might never have heard of. For instance I wanted to partition some data evenly into buckets so I told me about the first fit decreasing algorithm, which was exactly what I needed for what I wanted to do.

I think where I have found it most useful has been for sort of jogging my memory. For example I was trying to think of a synonym of cool that started with a. Google gave me some, but they weren’t great where chat gpt came up with a better list and only words starting with a. Another example. I was trying to remember a song based on a small fragment of sort of the vibe of lyrics. Weirdly it made up a song name but I was able to coax it into producing more of the lyrics and from that found the song with google.

You have to negotiate with it and challenge it. It's not completely magic, but when you get into a good "dialogue" with it, the results can really flow.

Right. You have to know what results are correct and then you can stear it in that direction, but if you already know the answer to what you're asking then what's the use?

I see it as an impressive toy at this point. Not to downplay the work they've done an it's certainly progress but it suffers from the same problems as all AI so far. Seems good mainly for spam or for automating writing another dozen of those horrible motivational books. It doesn't work for search/research, it's still faster and less troublesome to do that on your own. At least if you care about quality results/correct information.

It's useful for connecting dots. Like maybe you know a few details about a problem but you're not sure where to find the information you need to dig deeper. ChatGPT is great at giving you more to grab onto. Of course you still need to think critically before and after interacting with it, but the amount of dead end Google searches I'm avoiding with this thing is amazing!

I use it daily now.

1. Little programming tasks. I.e., write me a javascript function that extracts the tweetid from a tweet. Beats Googling it and then having to research through 15 years of Stackoverflow posts

2. Email upgrades. Sometimes I write something but it doesn't sound right, so I ask ChatGPT to rewrite it. Sometimes it works sometime it doesn't. It's a timesaver nonetheless.

I do a ton of voice dictation, and the notes are usually haphazardly written and rife with structural and semantic issues.

With the appropriate prompt I can literally just toss the entire block of text into chat GPT and it will spit out a polished structured version of my original transcript, I've probably saved dozens of hours already.

It does an excellent job summarizing and restructuring existing data.

I have heard people using it for fiction generation, but the results that I have seen are highly unimpressive and tend to be extremely formulaic. Impressive for a LLM but not for a good storyteller.

It varies a lot. I've had it write lots of lines of (at first glance) correct code, I've also had it suggest options for software (snakemake in my case) that didn't seem to exist on closer investigation.

But, it's a lot of fun the first couple of times. I recommend everybody to play with it. Have it plan a trip, write a short sci-fi story with your colleague in the lead. Ask it about how it can "think". It feels magical.

I open a tab in the morning and ask it things throughout the day, whenever I need to search for something.

I haven't found it particularly effective for code synthesis, however, I do use it extensively for fiction generation. While I don't use its output verbatim, it serves as a great source of inspiration and guidance. Additionally, I've found it to be an excellent resource for personal, relationship, financial, and self-improvement advice. Of course, it's important to use your own judgement and not take everything literally, but it has often led me to valuable reflections and insights.

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