I'm a backend software engineer/consultant/presales dude. While I've seen lots of ways that people have used GPT and other LLMs like it, I personally haven't found any use for it.
I'm comfortable searching Google (or man pages) when I need answers while programming; I'm pretty good at that, actually.
I also don't need help writing stuff (though my writing skills can always improve!)
However, I can't help but feel like me _not_ using GPT for stuff will leave me behind, which I don't want to have happen.
Is anyone else in a similar boat? If so, how have you used GPT to stay current?
It is great for get thing done in $language stuff at work where all sorts of programming languages are used. O(opinionated past devs). Good for powershell or bash scripts where I don’t always know what is possible. Why bust your brain writing an awk command!
I find most prompt engineering articles pointless. First, the AI is increasingly getting better at understanding your intentions. So a technique applied to cgpt3.5 won’t be necessarily applicable to v4. Second, there’s no one size fits all prompt. What works best is just learning how to articulate your ideas in natural language. I’m surprised that people ignore this and then look for magical prompts to help them get things done.
> What works best is just learning how to articulate your ideas in natural language. I’m surprised that people ignore this and then look for magical prompts to help them get things done.
A lot of people speak natural language well enough, but think about it-- our interaction with computers since their inception was always bounded by constraints of some sort. Games have rules, engines have limits, languages have structure, etc.
Then a tool shows up that appears able to do anything. The people who have taken to it the best are all creative types, while many of us have had our creative paths beaten out of us. The guides I've seen are clickbait but the better ones have some use in teaching those of us who've been forced to live in a box to think outside of it again by example.
I never would have thought that a chatbot could keep track of tokens/counters just by asking it to (like a D&D GM) until I saw a prompt demonstrating that. My previous chatbot experience was ELIZA, later AIML, and some really annoying "customer service" reps, and all were bounded gimmicks that couldn't do this. (AIML allowed some getting/setting of variables, but was very rigid.)
Then there's SD, which I can appreciate but don't particularly enjoy. If you don't know how to speak like a MFA and/or aren't familiar with the terms used to train the dataset, you won't get as much out of it. Guides help here too.
FYI - the main Call to Action button on the homepage, "Start Learning" linking to /docs, gives a 404 error. On the other hand, the menu items "AI 101", "Chat GPT" work fine to navigate to the content.
I'm a backend software engineer/consultant/presales dude. While I've seen lots of ways that people have used GPT and other LLMs like it, I personally haven't found any use for it.
I'm comfortable searching Google (or man pages) when I need answers while programming; I'm pretty good at that, actually.
I also don't need help writing stuff (though my writing skills can always improve!)
However, I can't help but feel like me _not_ using GPT for stuff will leave me behind, which I don't want to have happen.
Is anyone else in a similar boat? If so, how have you used GPT to stay current?