Yeah I'm not convinced. As usual with most pro-ChatGPT posts I see, there is little to no actual useful information on how to use ChatGPT practically.<p>When I read one of these articles or posts, I usually expect to see concrete prompts, their output, and how they can be used to speed up development. Instead all I see is generic vagueisms; "it helps me write unit tests", "it helps me code faster", or in the case of this article "it’s taken over how I plan, design, and implement software." with little to no real examples of how this works. It almost feels like people want to brag that they've discovered "the secret sauce" rather than help others understand how to use it.<p>I've tried multiple times now to use ChatGPT. In every case ChatGPT has produced code that has bugs, needs to be double checked, or simply straight up doesn't work. It IS impressive how it's able to create code that seemingly does what you ask, and it's lightyears ahead of other products, but in no way have I found it to be a gamechanger. IMHO, at best it might steer me in the right direction, and at worst it completely wastes my time. Seems pretty overhyped to me.
None of this is about <i>writing</i> software? Sure, these things are useful for building products, marketing, etc. but none of it is technical - how am I going to <i>write</i> better software with ChatGPT? Believe me, I've tried, and it's not that good!
Unfortunately for this poor foolish man, he has spiked his own credibility with his zeal for AI. I mean, aren’t you kind of dismissing this post as “oh it was probably written by ChatGPT.”<p>One indicator of low credibility is that he keeps saying “this saved me weeks of work” for things that look like they might take a few minutes to do with a spreadsheet, or else could be Googled, or for which there are already free tools, or frankly don’t even need to be done.<p>I have a bias about his project that I will admit: he seems to be yet another one of those smug entrepreneurs who’s goal in life is to contribute nothing creatively or intellectually to the world. A parasite. Fills me with loathing.
> If you routinely pass in a dataset to AI, it can identify anomalies and watch to see if it settles or even reason why the anomaly occurred in the first place. You can provide the AI some guidelines to only alert when something needs attention if it meets a certain set of criteria. This ultimately increases the effectiveness of your on-call crew and lowers your TCO purely based on manpower.<p>> ...<p>> So you could use ChatGPT to identify activity trends of an individual to get a statistically high likelihood of reaching them online. Imagine this audit history<p>> [dataset of login and logout timestamps] `Return a json object with a "sendAtTime" property in ISO-8601 format that has the highest likelihood of reaching the person the next time they are online.`<p>This feels like it is slightly conflating the strengths of LLMs and AI as a whole.<p>There are certainly machine learning models that would assist in predicting when a user will be next online, and using an AI assistant to assist in writing such an implementation would likely be helpful.<p>However, passing JSON into an LLM, asking it to emulate a program to perform this functionality, and then parsing the response to extract other JSON doesn't feel like a stable approach (for example: I was unable to recreate their successful execution under ChatGPT v3), especially given this technique, if widely adopted, may end up including user-controlled fields that would make the system vulnerable to prompt injection.
I'm one of those annoying people who won't shut up about NixOS and thinks the LLMs are a bit of a fad, but chatGPT4 blew me away recently when debugging build issues with Nix derivations.<p>Whatever combination of the nixlanguage being obscure but also concise, but also, one of the largest github repos seems to have left ChatGPT with a fantastic understanding of the language.<p>Often you can just paste the error message in unprompted and it will guide you on your way, suggesting missing package names or bad assumptions.<p>* <a href="https://chat.openai.com/share/3b554aa0-5f1b-49e2-bce7-cfe60b2f93cb" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://chat.openai.com/share/3b554aa0-5f1b-49e2-bce7-cfe60b...</a><p>* <a href="https://chat.openai.com/share/dfd30c49-505f-4b95-b6cb-759b7f1bb3a0" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://chat.openai.com/share/dfd30c49-505f-4b95-b6cb-759b7f...</a><p>* <a href="https://chat.openai.com/share/55dfcbed-2f9d-457f-b1ca-5486fe7b0c71" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://chat.openai.com/share/55dfcbed-2f9d-457f-b1ca-5486fe...</a>
It can generate example data for tests but why would I want that when, if I use a good property testing framework, I already have that; and it can shrink examples sensibly so that I get the minimal failing example for my test?<p>Generating code seems worse too. I agree that you don’t need “perfect,” software if you’re building a blog for your local soccer team. Maybe you want more precaution if you’re initiating trades in securities. And definitely a lot more scrutiny if you’re building real-time control systems for helicopters. Verifying that code is correct with regards to its specification first requires a precise, formal specification; and second, is still a lot of work.<p>Eyeballing every line of code to catch errors ChatGPT introduces into your code isn’t going to work. You’re not a compiler or theorem prover and you’re bad at finding errors in code. Really bad. It’s not your fault; code becomes incredibly complex quickly.<p>At best, right now, it’s a curious toy and maybe useful for some folks as a “smart” autocomplete. But beyond that ChatGPT seems to struggle. And I struggle to find a use for it myself.
The comment about asking ChatGPT for the content (in this case an alternative to a workout database) is interesting. They supposedly saved "weeks" not building up the domain knowledge necessary to build up proper workout plans. ...but without doing that work, how do they know the AI content is any good?
I don't think building applications around it is a good idea. You might face the same problems Reddit developers are facing right now with Reddit's API.<p>What happens if OpenAI decides to increase the price on you? Now you are losing massive amounts of money and have no where to go.<p>What if OpenAI decides they don't like how your company is operating and bans you from using OpenAI APIs. Where do you go?<p>What happens if OpenAI changes their model over night and now you are getting bad responses from your prompt. What do you do?<p>What happens if OpenAI's API goes down?<p>Unlike most services you use to build application there is no alternatives to OpenAI's API. You can't simply switch to another LLM API and expect the same results.
The author seems really happy about his "random muscle group into chatgpt into workout plan for the day" automation but having exercised for 12 years it seems incredibly naive to me.<p>I mean sure, if it keeps things fresh and keeps you moving it's better than nothing but that's not a good structure if you want to progress past a year of training or do anything serious.<p>Literally just doing a random program like the reddit recommended BWF routine is vastly superior and doesn't require chatgpt or serverless or anything..
I have found ChatGPT to give bad answers for more complicated questions. For example, the other day I encountered some TypeScript code that surprised me. Basically it was:<p>class A { @SomeDecorator() x: string }<p>const value: A = {x: "foo"};<p>I was surprised that it compiled at all and structural typing applied to classes, even though '!(value instanceof A)'. But it worked! I asked ChatGPT for more information about this, and basically it just told me that it wouldn't compile, which was obviously wrong.
It’s not a bad article. Only feedback I would have is about this passage:<p>“””
If you routinely pass in a dataset to AI, it can identify anomalies and watch to see if it settles or even reason why the anomaly occurred in the first place.
“””<p>This is not a great use for LLM’s. AI? Sure. But not this type of it.
i use gpt4 daily.<p>it’s not very good at writing code, but can write code in small well defined chunks.<p>i’m working on a game with blender, cpp, physx, and wickedengine.<p>it writes a lot of python for blender with prompts like:<p>blender. python. apply transforms to every object unless X.<p>these tend to work, if scoped small enough, and any exceptions or failures are put as followup prompts.<p>writing python for blender is more annoying than hard, so this is great.<p>the other type of prompt i use a lot is like this:<p>blender. did X. expected Y. got Z. why?<p>i use prompts like these a lot, for cpp, physx, and wickedengine. often i ask for code, but not to copy it verbatim, but because i’m thinking in code.<p>these types of prompts usually output a list of possibilities. almost always the list contains what i’m looking for. usually it’s the first item.<p>a gamedev prompt might be:<p>wickedengine. code. how to rotate normal 90 degrees right on y in world?