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Comment by luma | Hacker News Reader

This is an observation I've seen a lot around here. Underneath it is the assumption that "if I can't figure out how to get meaningful use out of a tool, the tool must be useless".

OpenAI didn't sign up 100M users without somebody somewhere finding it to be useful. Like any other tool, it's utility is limited mostly by the person wielding it.

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The tools seem useful, but I'm not sure they are. too often they will confidently make up an answer that is wrong. When I use them they do great on trivial problems but can't help on hard ones.

Reframe your thinking. You’re approaching it like other computer systems, where a given input yields a determined output. Instead, treat it like a junior dev whom you can unload an unlimited amount of work to, but the result still requires review.

We’re all used to working this way in human systems, people that sound confident might also be wrong, and you learn where you might trust them more or less as you work with them over time. Until you are confident that they are always “right” in a given problem domain, you need to apply some level of review.

Finally, keep in mind that there are "smarter" and "dumber" LLMs. If you didn't pay for what you were doing, you were talking to a "dumber" model. The quality does go up if you have $20 in your pocket.

The junior engineers I know tend to ask questions not be confidently wrong. That isn't to say they are always right but they make a very different class of errors.

Again, this is a tool you can use. You can complain that it doesn't work in the way you expect, or you can learn how it operates and how best to use it. If you can't figure out how to apply it to your work, that's fine, but loads of other people are doing exactly that with or without you.

> When I use them they do great on trivial problems but can't help on hard ones.

That sounds super useful! The tools free you up from wasting time on trivial problems so you have more time to focus on the hard ones. What's not to love?

I try to work on complex problems. Sometimes they hide something easy

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