Hacker News Reader

Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

The tools are at their most useful when they're replacing Stack Overflow searches for common tasks.

An example I had last night: how do you split a pdf into separate pages on the command line, and how do you put them back together again (I replaced one of the pages with a scanned signed version).

This is a basic task, a beginner's task in the world of pdf munging, but I didn't know the answer off the top of my head. ChatGPT gave me command lines straight away.

That's what they're good for right now. Beginner / common tasks in areas you're not familiar with.

And a further implication, they're great for one man bands, generalist roles where simple things need to be done in lots of different areas. For specialist deep roles where you have all the tacit knowledge in mind already, not nearly as useful.

View on HN

> The tools are at their most useful when they're replacing Stack Overflow searches for common tasks.

Interesting, because I still find it faster/easier to do a quick DDG search, with a click on the first relevant SO post, and scrolling straight to the top answer. Asking the same question to ChatGPT means waiting for its output, which may be objectively a few ms faster but creates the perception of slowness ( = irritation). (That is: waiting for X seconds is more disruptive than taking several actions for 1.5X seconds.)

And then it's definitely going to be much more verbose, which is worse 99% of the time. SO is nicely folded - if I want a deeper explanation, I look at the answer's comments, or I can read other answers, or I can even read the full question. ChatGPT doesn't have the same guarantee of such a clear information hierarchy in its answers.

I see these complaints about ChatGPT's verbosity, but this is no different than when crafting an effective google query was a skill in the early 2000s.

Here's a GPT4 response to a (poorly written) prompt from me to answer the parent question and try to satisfy your desire for a straight-to-the-point response.

https://i.imgur.com/OmsHaXO.png

> Using only the command line, answer the following question (also, keep it terse, no extraneous narrating please): how do you split a pdf into separate pages on the command line, and how do you put them back together again

Ok, but that's not an answer to my actual point, because now it's more work than doing a web search for the same solution.

I often find that the top Stack Overflow answer doesn’t adequately answer my question, so it’s not faster for me.

For example, sometimes the top answer is long and requires a few minutes of reading, sometimes there are corrections in the replies that need to be read, and sometimes I don’t fully understand it and therefore need to read multiple replies.

This can easily take up 5 - 15 minutes, versus 1-5 minutes for ChatGPT.

Additionally, I find value in NOT having to keep myself from getting distracted by the tons of other highly interesting things on Stack Overflow. It can be nice to have that focused, text-only, distraction-free dialogue that ChatGPT provides.

Yes, I mostly use ChatGPT for ffmpeg commands. Just give it the description along with the full file path and it will output the correct command 99% of the time. Bard can also do that (not as well though) but the format of the answer is so much worse, the resulting command is not put in a code block for example.

For me, they are more miss than hit. I was amazed in the initial days but I have bounced back to searching from google and reading stackoverflow. It’s not just about finding solution for your problem, it’s also looking at what other options are there and comparing them mentally is a really good exercise. You learn a lot by that way. The comments and not accepted solution are also invaluable.

> it’s also looking at what other options are there and comparing them

I think I'm still better off starting with clChatGPT, I can always follow up with "list 5 alternative solutions".

Chatgpt is fastfood of programming. We all know how healthy that is

By the way, on macos the preview tool can do this. You can drag and drop pages between documents using the sidebar and reorder them the same way.

That's interesting and relevant to know if you'd be doing this a few times. And it doesn't invalidate your point at all, but the time savings of having a machine tell you really fast how to do something simple is valuable.

I recently had to do a 'git pull' on 120 repositories, and of course we already had an in-house tool to do that. Of course I could google a script to do it. But it saved me 5 minutes to just have ChatGPT write it for me, and I saved the overhead of a more thorough context-switch.

Even the guy sitting next to me. "Hey, check this out, ChatGPT wrote this script for me and saved me 5 minutes". "Oh, but we already have a tool for that". "Yeah, I figured. Where is it?" "Ummmmm, I don't know, let me ask someone. Frank maybe?" And 5 minutes spent chasing Frank.

Hopefully that ad-hoc second script never makes it into persistent storage or a repo, otherwise you now have 2 of them and Frank will think his part to himself about others duplicating things.

Cool. I wasn't running macOS though.

This is exactly what I don't understand about it. I copied your question directly from your comment into google and the top-ten results were all sufficient to answer the question. The nature of common tasks is that the answers are also common, so where's the value in paying for a service that regurgitates them to you?

Somewhat agreed on chatgpt specifically. Having in-IDE tooling that can take context and provide info, corrected for context, is more useful than having to jump to a browser, then copy paste. It's usually not much of an effort itself, but it does help minimize drift and helps keep focus. Every time I jump to a search engine to search, or SO, I'm bombarded with loads of info to filter out, then more to judge for relevancy. Tools that help reduce that filtering burden, and more context-aware relevancy, help.

Time, specificity, and interaction.

1. Time — for me to search Google and then read anywhere from 1-10 links to get an answer typically takes anywhere from 5 - 30 minutes. The average is probably 10-15 minutes. But using ChatGPT takes less than 1 minute.

2. Specificity — ChatGPT gives me answers to more specific questions, with no fluff text to read through, no ads, no redirects, no links that appear to answer my specific question but actually don’t when I click on them and read them. I get a specific answer to a specific question.

3. Interaction — If I have follow-up questions and/or need clarification or alternative options/solutions I can simply ask ChatGPT and it answers. I often find that getting answers to followup questions via web search takes even longer than the original search.

These all make it worth it for me. And that still doesn’t touch on all the other use cases that search engines don’t do at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com