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Comment by sznio | Hacker News Reader

I did.

It's painfully slow. I can Google the question, click one of the top results, skip to the relevant part and read it faster than GPT can generate two sentences. You also have to build an elaborate prompt instead of throwing two/three keywords into it.

It doesn't help that GPT is insistent on replying in the three paragraph format, meaning that the first 30-40 words it creates are just trash to be ignored.

I found it useful once - when I had to write an essay about ISO 27001 for college and just wanted it to go away. Took what it generated and spent 20 minutes editing it to look closer to my style. For real work it isn't as useful.

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> I can Google the question, click one of the top results, skip to the relevant part and read it faster than GPT can generate two sentences.

Ironically, this is why people like me prefer LLMs (when they're accurate). With Google, about 50% of the times the top SO hit is not answering my question. So I have to click 5-10 SO links, parse each one to see if:

1. The question being asked is relevant to my problem.

2. The answer actually answers it.

I may be able to do it quickly, but it is a tedious burden on my brain. While GPT doesn't always work, the nice thing about it is that when it does work, it has taken care of this burden for me.

Also, GPT's pretty much memorized a lot of the answers. I once asked it an obscure question involving openpyxl. It gave a perfectly working answer. I wondered: Did it reason it and generate the code, or is there a SO post with the exact same answer? So I Googled it, and sure enough, there was an SO question with the same code!

Except GPT's solution was superior in one tiny respect: The SO answer had some profanity in the code (in a commented line). GPT removed the profanity :-)

I find it incredible you find a LLM slower and less full of useless chitchat about a question than stack overflow.

I don’t even open SO anymore; if it has a direct answer to your question, the LLM almost certainly does too; and asking new questions on SO is basically impossible.

If you manage to survive the gauntlet of “too specific, already answered, not general interest, arbitrary moderator activity”, the chances of getting an answer that answers your question can take forever; most likely you’ll get a stupid answer that doesn’t answer it, upvoted by idiots who don’t understand that it not an answer the the actual question, and, ultimately, because it “already has an answer”, ignored, never to receive an answer.

Maybe one day, a passing savant will answer in a comment.

…and yet, you find it faster and more reliable?

You, and I, have had different experiences on stack overflow in the last two years.

> For real work it isn't as useful.

To you.

> To you.

Which was the whole point of this chain :)

I think maybe you haven't been using GPT4 (the one where you have to pay money). Or else you're coming at it with a very strong prior, or you're not asking it about software engineering questions, or you're not phrasing your questions carefully. GPT4 is demonstrably extremely useful for technical questions in the realm of software engineering, and in addition to surfacing useful answers, it (obviously) presents a completely unprecedented conversational interface.

Can you give an example of a technical software question where you found it wasn't helpful? I'll see if I can get a good answer and post the permalink for you. I suspect you're not phrasing your questions well.

I add "no preamble, no summary" to a lot of my prompts to avoid that wordiness.

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