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Comment by abhaynayar | Hacker News Reader

I had bought into the GPT-4 hype. I used GPT-4 on ChatGPT Plus for two months, but then I unsubscribed because I wasn't using it as much as I thought I would.

It's certainly a very interesting technology. But in it's current form, I just don't see it replacing most jobs. Will it replace jobs if we scale further? I don't know, but my intuition says no. I feel that we will need some other major breakthroughs in AI to get there.

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The combination of ChatGPT and Phind helped me, a noob with 8 months of coding knowledge, build an app with real paying users and revenue. I would have never accomplished this on my own, and now I have a working prototype to find co-founders and possible investors.

Founder of Phind here. Hearing something like this really touches me and the team and this is exactly why we do what we do.

The Pair Programmer feature is absolutely fantastic and a massive gamechanger. It helped me figure out the architecture for a new app I'm planning. I showed it to a senior developer in my coworking space and he said - in his own words - "yep, that's how I would approach it too".

Wow, that's amazing! We'd love to talk to you about your experience and hear your feedback -- my email is michael@phind.com.

How on earth are you affording the OpenAI API fees?

Starts with V and rhymes with sea.

Please write a blog post about your journey!

Would you mind sharing the app link? Curious to see what you made with the help of AI.

Unfortunately that would mean doxxing myself. But its largely a somewhat complex CRUD app with a user dashboard. The stac is nextjs, tailwind, and nodejs, express on the backend.

Did you use templates for the dashboard or just GPT, any complex prompting resources?

I built most off my UI off of FlowBite (which is a tailwind UI library). Did not need to use complex prompting resources, though I would sometimes switch between Phind and chatGPT-4 to get a better answer.

I think it works because its not a very complex app and since it's gated with a sufficiently high entry, I don't expect a ton of traffic, hence scaling is not an issue. I also chose the easiest options to deploy (Vercel for the frontned, Heroku for the backend), which might end up costing me in the long run - but I figure I'll get that fixed later

noob with 8 months of coding knowledge? That's why you have posts like:

My year in tech regrets ([insertyouwebsitehere].com) 7 points by spaceman_2020 on Jan 15, 2014 | past | 3 comments

You can be in tech without knowing how to code, you know :)

Sorry, I'm just not seeing it.

I've tried phind and it's almost always worse than a Google search. It often has a reasonable answer, but with Google I typically find more complete information and sometimes better rebuttals and alternatives.

I view the thing as a neat toy. Can you learn from it? Maybe. But if you think this allows you to learn something you couldn't otherwise, I wonder if you're really being honest with yourself.

I reckon the kind of questions I’m asking are way more basic than an experienced developer would. GPT-4 is likely way better at answering simpler questions since there is usually far more tutorial content geared towards noobs online than.

I have no delusions that this is making me a good coder, or that I can carry this beyond the prototype stage - I fully intend to find a CTO/co-founder. But for someone going from 0 to 1, this has been a fantastic tool.

may i ask how you got paying users?

It’s been incredibly helpful to me. It helped me figure out how to get docker containers setup. It’s even helped me figure out how to run data analysis on graph data. It’s not just made things simpler – it’s made things possible.

>"It’s not just made things simpler – it’s made things possible"

Nice slogan... is this an ad?

Lol just an attempt at being pithy. It’s true though. Something about ease of functionality curves making whole classes of new use cases / customers possible.

This is true. Particularly if you're a polgyglot working with many different stacks. You know how to do something in X and you've never done it in Y.

Explain it to ChatGPT and it gets you 95% there.

It's a huge time saver. Sure you could do it by browsing the web and sticking together a bunch of pieces, rewrite it twice etc.

100%. I do know it might come bite me in the ass at some point.

Already I didn’t realise my docker container was saving data to the NON-PERSISTENT data volume. But that was a greater reflection of Chatgpt taking me beyond my knowledge limits, and me being in a place where my ignorance of my ignorance can lead to not-great consequences.

Don't feel too bad about that one. I've seen Docker's default of non-persistent storage cause disaster even for professionals with years of experience. It's just a really bad bit of design.

The strange thing is, search engines used to be able to do this. But they have gotten progressively more terrible at finding a very specific result based on a very specific query.

My ChatGPT experience is not that different from the "good old days" of searching the internet. This time the search is in latent space which has up- and downsides.

I don't disagree with the usefulness for you particularly.

But all these things were possible before ChatGPT.

Same for me. The benefits are obviously not going to be uniformly distributed because intelligence is not uniformly distributed.

If I was more intelligent I would be less impressed with it because I would probably already know what it has taught me. I understand the thermodynamics of that submarine implosion now but if I had taken any kind of physics I would have already known all that. I didn't take physics though. This pretty much extends to all subjects.

I will have to have it teach me to setup docker containers.

The exercise I really need to get on is to try make something in a language that I have no clue about. Like Rust or Go I know nothing other than they are programming languages. Then it is an exercise in the skill of going from zero to not zero with the help of AI and that not zero will hopefully keep scaling up and up over time.

Yes, my experience is that most hype comes from people that don't actually work in the jobs they claim will be replaced. Writers, for example.

While generative AI does make writing some things more efficient, it almost always has a bland, generic style that is immediately recognizable. The only jobs it will be replacing are ones that didn't require much effort in the first place.

Isn't that almost always the case, and in truth the beauty of automation? Replacing simple, repetitive tasks that, if you have to do that, you say "I wish I had a machine doing this for me"?

Of course, that might impact the number of available jobs and it's something that need to be taken under control.

But, if talking about writers, while AI won't realistically replace imaginative authors and investigative journalists (at least, certainly not in the short term), it will likely replace (some) copy editors and dollar-per-thousand-words "journalists" that have to fill tabloids and free subway "newspapers". While it might be a financial loss for the people involved, the society will hardly sink due to that. In fact, if I feel optimist, in theory it might reduce costs for publishing houses and newspapers, to invest more into quality (human-made) content.

ChatGPT will definitely be used for rote tasks that are currently fulfilled by low-end writers, but realistically could already be automated by a competent programmer. Stuff like generic product descriptions or content farm product reviews. But I don't see it actually replacing flesh-and-blood writers that have a viewpoint anytime soon.

This is the main thing I'm curious about, as with any technology: fad or paradigm?

I can't see anything on Twitter anymore, but before that happened I think I hadn't seen many of the entertaining ChatGPT conversation screenshots anymore. That entertainment use case had the hallmarks of faddishness.

It seems far more useful as a productivity aid though, but as the OP discussed, I doubt the chat prompt UI is going to be the paradigm for that. Copilot is already mostly a more useful UI for me, and I suspect that's where this is headed, with a bunch of different specializations (and even more failed attempts).

I agree. It may be helpful under certain circumstances, but under different ones it might actually slow you down, thereby yielding a net productivity gain of zero. At least, that's what it did for me personally.

What I worry about is human greed in relation to AI, be it GPT or anything else. The incentives are lined up to produce something akin to AGI and the tools are becoming more tangible. The goal is to tap the honey pot of automating current knowledge labor first and foremost. Later, other areas of labor.

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