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Ask HN: Anybody finding AI agents useful?
8 points by manuelmorales 9 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 8 comments
I'm fascinated with the idea of AI agents like autogen, chatdev, crewai, etc. But I failed to get anything useful out of them. The few times I tried, they spent a few dollars in chat gpt calls just to struggle doing something minimally useful. Is any of you getting anything of value out of them lately?



If you don't know how a certain algorithm works at a high level you can ask ChatGPT to explain it. For example, if you not sure what OAuth is or how to implement it that would probably be something ChatGPT could explain to you and if there's anything that confuses you you can can ask followup questions.

I find it sucks for code in most scenarios I need, but it's useful as a kind of knowledge base / tutor.

Personally I've found I'm using it progressively less as time goes on as I find more things it's bad at.


How do you verify that the explanation is 100% correct? For all I know answers are 100% hallucinated, with most parts coinciding with reality but some not. A non expert (me) cannot tell which parts happen to be the accurate ones.

I use phind which summarizes an answer and provides references for each statement. Much better.


Well human-made answers usually tend to be not 100% true as well. It is best to take everything with a grain of salt.


This. I try to envision ChatGPT as an acquaintance that’s chatty, helpful but also guesses a lot and say things confidently even if they’re unsure. I.e. verify the info you receive from them, compare it to other sources. Which is usually a good idea for any information you receive. Good old Quellenkritik, if you will.


You get a better understanding by poking at your learning objective from multiple directions, which hopefully gives one enough information to better grasp the information in proper technical resources.


My website builder has AI content generation for any text. I can make better headlines or short content blurbs with better SEO results.

I used this to create 10 blog articles to promote better traffic to my site. These articles took me 15 minutes to make. I intend to make blog articles every day to try and drive more traffic to my site.

Apparently this works according to SEO results.


I use ChatGPT (free) a lot for what would normally be quick Google searches. I get better answers - just the answers - without trawling through SEO spam, ads and overly verbose content. It feels like being a kid asking dad a bunch of questions and I love it.

It's good for coding too. I sometimes dread browsing the docs to remember how to do something simple like a .reduce call, so I have ChatGPT spit it out for me. It keeps me focused on bigger problems.

It's good at the first phase of travel planning, when I want a rough idea of what to see. I ask it to give a Google Maps search link for each result.


I recently used GPT for language learning. I just told it I would like it to generate a sentence of B1 level in English and then to correct my translation of it. Worked reasonably well.




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