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Comment by cozzyd | Hacker News Reader

I tried asking ChatGPT how to do something for the first time yesterday (an example of how to use libtar to write a tar file from buffers in memory, in C). It gave a very confident, but spectacularly wrong answer, concocting a whole new (admittedly more convenient for this purpose) API for libtar. After that experience, I'm not sure I'll ever ask ChatGPT for help again...

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Yep. But how does it compare to GPT-4 or Bing Chat? Then wonder how well GPT-5 will perform, and 6. Also, did rubber-ducking your query have a benefit regardless of the correctness of chat's answer?

I think the premier use for ChatGPT right now is as a starting place for writing tasks. I use it to give me a template for work emails from time to time because there is no element of correctness to get wrong.

I give it facts I want to see in prose, it gives me very neutral, inoffensive prose back. I always have to issue a few corrections to the prompt, and I always have to post edit, but it still saves me a huge amount of time and I don’t need to worry so much about bias leaking in and making anyone uncomfortable.

ChatGPT is (currently) like having an incredibly fast junior engineer working for you. You can ask it to do tasks for you and it will do them quickly, but you need to check its work. Sometimes it will be perfect, sometimes it will be right with a little more prompting, and sometimes it is completely wrong.

You use 3.5 or 4? It’s worth paying for 4. Significantly better results.

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