[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Most successful example using LLMs in daily ...
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Ask HN: Most successful example using LLMs in daily work/life?
Author : sabrina_ramonov
Score : 43 points
Date : 2024-05-20 20:30 UTC (2 hours ago)
| camjw wrote:
| GitHub copilot and nothing else comes close tbh.
| larsenal wrote:
| Have you tried https://cursor.sh/ at all? You still keep your
| GH copilot, but it has a better experience IMO.
| shreyarajpal wrote:
| I get really great value in using it for brainstorming. So a
| common workflow for me is write out a project plan and figure out
| issues, or familiarize myself with an engineering area really
| quickly.
| pgryko wrote:
| I use gpt4 for summarizing git diffs into commits (llama3 via
| groq also works nicey).
|
| Those then get used as part of my end of day report.
|
| Example code: https://www.piotrgryko.com/posts/git-conventional-
| commit-gpt...
| mateo1 wrote:
| I'm not a programmer, and when I write a program it's imperative
| that it's structured right and works predictably, because I have
| to answer for the numbers it produces. So LLMs have basically no
| use for me on that front.
|
| I don't trust any LLM to summarize articles for me as it will be
| biased (one way or another) and it will miss the nuance of the
| language/tone of the article, if not outright make mistakes.
| That's another one off the table.
|
| Although I don't use them much for this, I've found 2 things
| they're good at: -Coming up with "ideas" I wouldn't come up with
| -Summarizing hundreds (or thousands) of documents from a non-
| standard format (ie human readable reports, legal documents) that
| regular expressions wouldn't work with, and putting them into
| something like a table. But still, that's only when I care about
| searching or discovering info/patterns, not when I need a fully
| accurate "parser".
|
| I'm really surprised on how useless LLMs turned out to be for my
| daily life to be honest. So far at least.
| curtisblaine wrote:
| How do you ask an LLM to come up with good ideas? Everytime I
| try to use ChatGPT for idea generation, the results are subpar,
| but maybe it's me / my prompts.
| influx wrote:
| I usually will give a bullet list of ideas I already had and
| ask the LLM to add N more to the list, most of them will be
| garbage, but there might be 1 that I hadn't thought of, and
| I'll sort of recursively add that to the list, and continue
| that until I get what I need.
| vocram wrote:
| As a non native English speaker, it's very helpful to use a LLM
| to validate if a sentence I wrote is clear, correct, and if there
| is a more idiomatic way to express the same thing - btw, I did
| not do it with what I wrote here :-)
| woleium wrote:
| Your english is great!
| panza wrote:
| Copilot. I suspect a lot of us will (or already do) use it _at
| some level_ , even if it's just autocompleting logging
| statements, writing boiler plate/comments, suggesting
| improvements etc.
| nicklecompte wrote:
| I tried using GPT-4 as a better way to search papers - it can be
| very annoying when you know the gist of a result but not the
| authors or enough details about the methodology for Google. GPT-4
| was pretty good at figuring out what citation I wanted given a
| vague description.
|
| However, the confabulation/hallucination rate seemed highly
| subject-dependent: AI/ML citations were quite robust, but
| cognitive science was so bad that it wasn't worth using.
| Eventually I went back to the Old Ways. But there are a good
| number of academics that use it as an alternative to Google
| Scholar.
| tech_ken wrote:
| It saves me a lot of keystrokes as a coding copilot. Pretty good
| at detecting my usual patterns, and most of the time it can auto-
| complete a line with either something correct or something very
| close to correct (usually just a few small tweaks required). I
| write a lot of SQL and it's especially good at autocompleting big
| join clauses, which my carpals greatly appreciate.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| For me, it's when companies build a bot for their platform or
| app.
|
| Which has been trained on all this data, documentation, GitHub
| issues, Jira, Zendesk issues, Slack messages, etc. It's a sort of
| customer service bot that can help you code.
|
| That's been the real magic that I've experienced.
| Neff wrote:
| Interpersonal Communication - My employer is a big fan of the
| Clifton StrengthFinders school of thought, and I have found that
| generative LLMs are really helpful in giving me other ways to
| phrase asks to people that I tend to find difficult to
| successfully communicate with.
|
| I usually structure it like: --- My top 5 strengths in the
| Clifton StrengthFinders system are A,B,C,D,E and I am trying to
| effectively communicate with someone who's top five strengths are
| R,T,[?],[?],S.
|
| I need help taking the following request and reframing it in a
| way that will be positively received by my coworker and make them
| feel like I am not being insensitive or overly flowery.
|
| The way I would phrase the request is <insert request here>.
|
| Please ask any questions that would help provide more insight to
| my coworker, other details that could resonate with them, or
| additional background that will help the translated request be
| received positively. ---
|
| While the output is usually too verbose, it gives me a better
| reframing of my request and has resulted in less pushback when I
| need to get people to focus on unexpected or different
| priorities.
| vundercind wrote:
| Have you gotten better at doing this without the LLM, maybe
| even extemporaneously? Wondering if enough exposure to that
| kind of modeling also serves an educational role.
| HayBale wrote:
| Text correction or generating a full sentences from scraps.
|
| Like I write a super messy barely coherent paragraph and ask LLM
| to streamline the text and make it easy to understand while
| avoiding the LLMs grandiose language. Obviously it needs some
| corrections but it's way faster than normal.
|
| Also just to shorten a longer text or even reformat the text
| accordingly to some direction.Like to convert daily notes to
| proper zettelkasten ones.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| I've been designing and developing a parser-based interactive
| fiction (text adventure) authoring system using .NET Core/C#.
|
| I started with ChatGPT and am now using Claude Opus 3.
|
| For background, I've been in tech for 40 years from developer to
| architect to director.
|
| Pairing with an LLM has allowed me to iteratively learn and
| design code significantly faster than I could otherwise. And I
| say "design" code because that's the key difference. I prompt the
| LLM for help with logic and capabilities and it emits code. I
| approve the bits I like and iterate on things that are either
| wrong or not what I expected.
|
| I have many times sped up the process of going down rabbit holes
| to test ideas when normally this would wipe out hours of wasted
| time.
|
| And LLMs are simply fantastic as learning assistants (not as a
| teacher). You can pick up a topic like data structures and an LLM
| can speed up your understanding of the elements and types of data
| structures.
|
| And best of all, it's always polite.
| jamesponddotco wrote:
| I use it for coding, checking grammar, improve the UX of command-
| line applications, learning new programming languages, and a
| bunch of other things. My wife recently decided to go back to
| university to study translation, and Claude has been a great tool
| for her studies too.
|
| Honestly, I can't remember my life before LLMs and that is a bit
| scary, but my productivity and overall self-esteem improved quite
| a bit since I started using them. Heck, I don't think I'd ever
| get into Rust if wasn't for the learning plan I got Claude to
| write for me.
|
| You can find my prompts in the llm-prompts[1] repository. Any new
| use case I come up with ends up there--today I used it to name a
| photography project, for example, so the prompt will end up in
| there after dinner.
|
| [1]: https://sr.ht/~jamesponddotco/llm-prompts/
| semireg wrote:
| I'm a firm believer that good enough means avoiding catastrophe.
| Baking bread? Making beer? Caulking a window? Just avoid these
| common mistakes the outcome will be good enough.
|
| I've gotten in the habit of asking LLMs to coach me to avoid the
| things that can go wrong.
| kardos wrote:
| It often replaces google search. Instead of sifting through heaps
| of SEO junk and accompanying trackers,ads,popups,widgets, etc and
| going through a search-term refinement cycle to eventually find
| something, the LLM immediately produces a clean (ad-free, nag-
| free, dark-pattern-free, etc) result. It generally needs to be
| checked for correctness and has limitations in terms of
| recentness. But avoiding the low-signal sea of crap that google
| returns is a breath of fresh air.
| Razengan wrote:
| > _the LLM immediately produces a clean (ad-free, nag-free,
| dark-pattern-free, etc) result_
|
| For now... :smilingfacewithtear:
| MountainMan1312 wrote:
| I'm autistic and sometimes I just cannot put my brain stuff into
| words. On a few occasions, I've just haphazardly shoved a list of
| thoughts into ChatGPT and said "make this sound not dumb" and it
| does just good enough. Usually I'll copy the general structure of
| the sentence/paragraph and change it around until it sounds like
| I wrote it.
|
| I mostly do that when I need to make a complete document, because
| I struggle with startings and endings. I like the middle.
| ammar_x wrote:
| I have Raycast extensions for GPT and Claude models. Whenever I
| have a question, the most powerful LLMs in the world are two key
| strokes away.
|
| This way is easier than going to the browser then ChatGPT tab for
| example then creating a new chat.
|
| I found myself using LLMs more and getting more out of them
| because of this frictionless interaction. They've become more of
| actual "helpful assistants."
| chasd00 wrote:
| I use it to help write proposals sometimes. I can prompt it to
| compare/constract two technology providers and that gets me
| started writing. It's never a perfect fit but it helps get the
| creative/sales juices flowing.
|
| I also use it for searches when i know the specific documentation
| i'm looking for has to compete with SEO spam. It's also pretty
| good at explaining code, i've pasted in some snippets of code
| from languages with snytax i'm not familiar with and ask it to
| explain what's happening and it does an ok job.
|
| i also like to use it for recipes like "create a recipe for
| chicken and rice that feeds 4", "make it spicier" etc.
| vundercind wrote:
| Sub question: anyone using _local_ or at least self-hosted AI
| systems productively? What kind of hardware does that take?
| What's the rough cost? Do you refine the model on custom data?
| What does _that_ part look like? (much higher hardware
| requirements, I expect?) Which open source projects are aiding
| your efforts?
|
| All I've done is try one of those pre-packaged image generation
| models on my M1 Air back when the first of those appeared.
| codazoda wrote:
| I don't know how productive I'm being but I'm using Llama3 via
| Ollama on a M1 Mac. It's as good as Copilot and Gemini for most
| things and I'll use those models if I need a little bit more. I
| prefer the privacy of the local models. I use it both through
| the command line and with the Open WebUI web interface. I use
| it for programming tips, learning, research, and writing. As a
| simple example, I wrote a (reusable) prompt for doing Chicago
| style title capitalization a few minutes ago. Normally I'd have
| to search for a web based tool and then manage through the
| crap. It's much quicker to ask a local LLM.
| freitzkriesler2 wrote:
| Make a wordy email more concise, otherwise they're mostly toys.
| macintux wrote:
| I've used it for simple code suggestions when working in a
| language I'm unfamiliar with, or testing some new (to me) corner
| of Python.
|
| I used it to help me think through what I'd need for color film
| development in my darkroom.
|
| Basically if I already have some idea of what I need, I trust it
| to help guide me. I can evaluate its output sufficiently well.
|
| If I'm learning something entirely new, where it doesn't matter a
| great deal whether I get it right but I can test the output, it's
| pretty useful too.
| gmuslera wrote:
| Learning. It is not passive anymore. You have a conversation, you
| can ask why, if something different would work, how something
| would be done without going though a lot of documentation,
| criticism on your proposed solutions, you have all the time you
| want, go at your own time schedule, ask about ideas you got while
| walking, etc.
|
| It may make learning more personal, your own path, and you can
| ask if you are missing something important doing it that way.
|
| And it works for most topics, for most ages, at your own pace. We
| are entering a Diamond Age.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| None, so far. I had high hopes for copilot and JetBrains
| Assistant, but both of them are way more verbose than my usual
| coding style. Maybe that's just me, but I have my set of
| libraries that I use in C++ or Go and the result is that I rarely
| need to write much boilerplate. But I guess for that LLMs would
| work great, if only I could trust them as much as battle-tested
| libraries.
| Aromasin wrote:
| I live in Europe so most of my customers don't have English as a
| first language. Any questions are generally in pretty broken
| English. Honestly, reading through and making sense of what
| they're trying to say is a real mental challenge at times. I use
| LLMs to reformat and structure their message/ticket, which I
| paste into my notes. The accuracy is pretty good - certainly as
| good as me, although I do proof-read. I then ask it to pull out
| the pertinent information and bullet point it. I can turn those
| bullets into action items for me to investigate or respond to. It
| saves me about 15 minutes on each case, meaning I save maybe an
| hour every day in translating.
|
| The next is for writing up beauracratic nonsense my organisation
| asks me to do. Monthly status reports, bandwidth allocation,
| deal-win summaries and the like. I write down what I've done at
| the end of each day, so I just feed that into an LLM and ask it
| to summarise the bulk bullet points into prose. It saves me god
| knows how many hour refactoring documents. I modify the prose
| when it's done, to match my personal style and storytelling
| methodology, but it gets me the barebones draft which is the most
| time consuming part.
|
| I love LLMs personally, and am embracing them primarily as a
| scribe and editor.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| I have been thinking for a long time that we do not have (to the
| best of my knowledge) a good transcript formatter, and that
| Transformers should be part of the solution - a huge wealth of
| material is on YouTube, and its subtitles do not use punctuation.
|
| I can confirm that requesting LLMs to format bare subtitles
| adding punctuation (from commas to paragraphs, with quote marks,
| dashes, colons etc.) can work very well.
|
| It may seem a minor feature, but it is something that information
| consumers easily benefit from (when you need to process material
| in video format you can download the subtitles, add formatting
| with an automation, then efficiently skim, or study, or process
| transcripts and video together...).
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Among the topmost cases of usefulness of LLMs you should place
| the possibility of obtaining information (or pointers to
| information) that search engines will not return as they "do not
| understand the question", or produce excessive noise in the
| results...
| collinvandyck76 wrote:
| I wrote a terminal app using bubbletea that talks to openai and
| saves conversations to a sqlitedb. i use it all the time to
| figure out what threads to pull on for a problem with which i'm
| unfamiliar. it has proven to be one of the biggest returns on
| effort i've ever invested in.
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