Comment by digging | Hacker News Reader

Comment by digging | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

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