Comment by ryanjshaw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryanjshaw | Hacker News Reader

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Your experience matches mine closely. I've had ChatGPT-4 do great and then it just gets confused after a while. I can literally tell it "task X is done" and it'll apologise and show me a list of tasks where X is still not done - this is clearly not just a context window issue, as I have repeated variations of my statement over and over in the same session and the issue persists.

I have ended up using it the same way you have - it's honestly the best anti-procrastination tool I've ever used because I can tell it my intentions, what I've thought of so far... and it'll spit out a list of bite-sized chunks that get me going. I find myself looking forward to telling the AI I've completed a task.

Similarly, if I'm facing a tricky design decision, I find that just writing it out for ChatGPT is extremely helpful for clarifying my thought process. I actually used to do this conversational decision making process in a text editor long before ChatGPT, but when I know there's an AI on the other end my thinking becomes clearer and more goal-oriented. And unlike talking to myself or a human friend, it's happy to just say "well if these are your concerns, let's start HERE and then see what happens".

Good rule of thumb with ChatGPT: you can’t exit loops. Once you’ve gone A > B > A, your best move is to start a new chat. Even then it may reproduce and you should do some similar but different task. Remember that it’s a prediction engine, weighing heavily on the existing prompt. So you say B again, or B1 and it’s like, I know what to do! A! Cause last time was A->B so let’s do it again.

In your case this would be “[]Task1”, “Task1 is done”, “[]Task1”, [here is where you start a new chat or fix it yourself if possible].

Instead of starting a new chat, why not change the prompt higher up in the conversation with the relevant detail that you have gained through the responses?

I think that would work and be better in some cases. The thing is you want to change things up, lose some context. I may not be able to go far enough back without losing progress to do that. But I could copy just the current state of the task (last response) to a new chat.

Ooh! That's a really good point - ChatGPT is effectively rubber-ducky as a service =)

This is exactly how I've been explaining LLM tech to my "non-geek" friends and family. I start by explaining rubber ducking, and how I now use chatgpt as a more advanced version of the process.

Hmm, I also use ChatGPT as an anti-procrastination tool and task manager, and it's never made a mistake with keeping track of my task list (except that when it sums the estimated times of subgroups of tasks, sometimes those sums are wrong).

Note that it outputs my updated task list every time I add or remove a task (I only asked it to do that one time), so even if old messages go outside of the context window, it's not a big deal because the full updated state of the list is output basically every other message.

Interesting. What's your prompt?

Details here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35390644

Here's a web app I found recently that should work way better for you. Idk what model it uses (its also free, it feels like chatgpt3.5, so I guess they are funding it out of pocket?)

https://goblin.tools/

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