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Comment by scarface_74 | Hacker News Reader

Yes I know hallucinations are a thing. But when I had problems lile that better prompting (don’t make assumptions) and telling it to verify all of its answers with web resources

For troubleshooting an issue my prompt is usually “I am trying to do debug an issue. I’m going to give you the error message. Ask me questions one by one to help me troubleshoot. Prefer asking clarifying questions to making assumptions”.

Once I started doing that, it’s gotten a lot better.

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How are you going to prompt the AI overview?

Why would I use Google for this use case

“There's a library I use with extensive documentation- every method, parameter, event, configuration option conceivable is documented.”

This is the perfect use case for ChatGPT with web search. Besides aside from Google News, Google has been worthless to find any useful information for years because of SEO.

The fact that you personally would use a different tool is surely neither here nor there. It's like wading into a conversation about car problems and telling everyone that you ride a motorbike.

I also don’t use a hammer when a screwdriver is at hand and is the most appropriate tool.

It’s the classic XYProblem.

It's not an XY problem or anything to do with customer service. It's more of a UX problem. Users are being presented with highly convenient AI summaries that have a relatively high level of innaccuracy.

It’s more like you are choosing to use a tool when for the use case cited, there are much better tools available. Maybe the new interactive “AI mode” for Google would be a better use case. But the web has been horrible for years trying to search for developer documentation instead of going to the canonical source because of all of the mirror sites that scrape content and add ads.

Alas, there does seem to be a strong tradition of that on HN. The car example is apropos, though instead it's more like "why do you own a car? I live in a hyper dense urban utopia and never drive anywhere!"

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