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Comment by mrbombastic | Hacker News Reader

Back to coding like caveman! Harumph

> Back to coding like caveman! Harumph

You can easily find helpful coding resources like Stackoverflow, blogs, and forums through a simple Google search. Relying solely on one source is not advisable, I think. Cloudflare, AWS, and now OpenAI are all central clouds. This is why we need independent forums, StackOverflow, blogs, etc. Otherwise, it is yet another monopoly. Anyway, it's always important to explore multiple options for accurate information. At least, that is how I do it. YMMV.

For large categories of questions, I get better answers faster on ChatGPT. If I'm not asking the most basic question on a subject I'm usually better off than I would be searching.

Here's my rule of thumb: if my search doesn't depend on recent information, and it is likely to return blog spam as the top result, then I will use ChatGPT instead.

I still use web search frequently to find project homepages, official and up-to-date documentation, news and announcements, discussion (hearing people's stories of their experiences with a product is a lot better than ChatGPT's noncommittal and abstract pros/cons), searching for videos/images, etc.

GPT 4 just got browsing, so I've actually started telling it to do the entire research phase I was gonna do and just let it grind it out without having to despair at Google's abysmal search results. Still a bit unreliable but actually gets it done quite well on occasion.

I was mostly joking but I will say part of the appeal of ChatGPT is 1) it is centralized so basically any question I have I can go to chatGPT versus hunting and pecking on the internet 2) answers are tailored to my needs versus a blog or stackoverflow which will often be close to but not exactly what I need. I’ll survive a few hours downtime but these damn jest timers just got much more annoying to deal with.

Not only that, but it also acts very pleased with itself when it manages to solve an issue in one attempt which is endlessly amusing.

Nah! you can use google like in the last year, vintage coding is cool. Abstinence symptoms is another issue.

> you can use google

what?! do we look like uncivilized coders to you? /s

I thought all software devs went extinct last week...

They’ve been replaced by LLM powered script kiddies with 20 years experience.

There's always copilot ... and the 10k other AI tools now.

9k of which are GPT wrappers ranging from very thin to substantial. It's very interesting, actually, that there's a single point of failure for so much AI software now.

like AWS

Unfortunately without the uptime of AWS.

I'm sure they'll get there.

I gotta say it's impressive what sort of reach OpenAI has with less than 400 employees

Thats because they have an army of sell-swords via MSFT

With the previous head of Hacker News as CEO... @sama its not that hard to see how far his reach may be.

I discovered Bard can actually be pretty useful when ChatGPT wouldn't load for me a few weeks ago. Now I go to it first just to see if it'll give me a good answer quick. If not then see if ChatGPT is available

Yet another reason to run your own local LLM. The new local LLMs are actually better than ChatGPT and approaching GPT-4 capabilities.

Checkout Gaunaco - it's absolutely incredibly good, and quite easy to get running at home with a simple Dockerfile.

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