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Comment by unsupp0rted | Hacker News Reader

I wish my colleagues wrote questions to me the way OpenAI expects me to write questions to ChatGPT.

Provide context? Too busy.

Write step by step? Delimit the question from the context? Why not just copy-paste an error message from somewhere then write below it "please advise"?

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Somewhat related to OP, but today I came across the one of the most impressive context-free prompts & responses that I have seen from OpenAI's LLM to date.

It was some overworked parent's pocket dial to ChatGPT, and it shocked me a bit with the apparent understanding of a very random series of prompts, with no context:

https://old.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/18j2k3s/funny_pocke...

Context is (almost) everything. I've the case at work during the day of handling a recommendation I dismissed a few days ago in a PR of mine. The coworker wrote 3 comments showing an increasing understanding of the problem (just a string to format), yet didn't even produced a code suggestion that was doing the same thing as the original.

Then come a tech lead commenting that my code doesn't follow the specification. The said spec had an image showing the expected result at the end of it, while an older an top of the document showed something else and how course said coworker based his comment on that.

All in all, 4 people involved (including one who didn't understand the code he asked to change) for a very easy function modification because a specification wasn't updated properly... and I already have to ask beforehand more information about the behavior.

/half-rant

What luxury! I’d kill for a copy-pasted error message! Usually I just get “it didn’t work.”

People notify you that something didn't work? What a treat! For me the work just doesn't get done, and you have to ask why before you get an explanation that there is some technical blocker.

People tell you that something did not work, after you ask them? I need to manage an email sequence with 8 follow ups to get explanations.

I've built email notifications into the major stuff, so on failure, my bot sends them an email with the error message. I've got my address in the reply-to. So they reply "please advise" and hit send.

For the minor stuff... a copy-pasted error message from the UI is luxury, you're right.

I don't know about your work but there are tools/libraries to instrument your applications. For native applications there are things like ABRT, for web applications there's Sentry and a lot of other tools.

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