How are you using ChatGPT for yourself?

I made a custom GPT and uploaded my books to it, and now use it for:

* A story bible (asking questions about characters, timelines, plot points, etc that I might have forgotten)

* A brainstorming tool that uses existing themes and characters for new ideas

* A rudimentary developmental editor or critic (does not replace my human dev editor, however)

* A character and environment art generator (this one is hit and miss with characters especially)

Tip for anyone doing this: make a separate GPT for each series. When I tried to upload books in two distinct series, even clearly labelled in the data, it started getting them confused. Works better to split them up.

I found it has replaced a large percentage of google searches for me - particularly programming related. I can literally put the same keywords in ChatGPT that I used to put into google, and I'll get answers from various programming language docs, with examples I can follow-up on, with no SEO spam / ads.

Whenever I have to write boilerplate code in a language or library I don't know well.

For example, "Give me a quick Python script that opens a window with PyQt5", or "Split a string on spaces in Emacs Lisp".

It's pretty much flawless for basic stuff like that.

I’ve had a big need for abstract algebra in a side project and ChatGPT 4 has been The Best tutor (on top of several books and YouTube videos). Gives examples on the spot for your specific needs in any way you want. Gives broad overviews of a subject so you can make deeper dives elsewhere (Google, Math Stackexchange). Relates concepts to other parts of math. Implements math in my programming language of choice.

I’m sure it’s hallucinated a few times, but I’m at such an early level that it’s typically fine. I learn either way in a way that’s set me way ahead of where I’d have been without it

I just bounce random showerthoughts I periodically have about various topics and it offers different perspectives I did not previously consider and helps connect dots in my head.

It's excellent at Socratic dialogue.

I sometimes use it to solve actual problems I'm having otherwise, usually software design related, and more recently involving Stable Diffusion since its April 2023 update.

Don't use it.

I tried using it for coding but it made up APIs constantly or had subtle errors. I don't know what people mean when they say it works for them. I can see it help as an icebreaker though. It just helps me get in the mood sometimes.

Other factual stuff ex nutrition questions, health stuff, historic events etc it's quite useless.

I am an LLM skeptic. I think there're a lot of people who're claiming that they find it valuable just like crypto was claimed to be valuable

besides coding, data analysis and creating my presentations

an awkward chrismas card generator

https://chat.openai.com/g/g-yzSEhwyJM-awkward-sweet-christma...

Christmas Dev Support

https://chat.openai.com/g/g-4AoVA5xhf-christmas-free-dev-sup...

My Personal Doctor

https://chat.openai.com/g/g-2v2gNkuad-doctair-free-medical-a...

My Yoga Buddy

https://chat.openai.com/g/g-SpeE49i2D-swami-vivekananda-gpt

A few use cases...

-I use it to clean up emails for work (paste in email, ask it to formalize it or make it more clear)

-My wife used it yesterday to create a rhyming scavenger hunt for the kids

-create Chrome extensions (tip, make sure it uses manifest version 3)

-I use it to create themed Teams video backgrounds

-Used it to create survey questions for Work From Home feedback for my staff.

Lots of other random uses as well. I've been a paying member since the start and it still blows my mind everytime I use it.

I haven't used it in a while now, but I had found it productive for a few things:

* writing blog posts and outline for blog posts

* writing SEO descriptions

Generally though, its output was just a starting point, and I'd have to make a lot of edits of my own to actually include something of a writer's voice, remove any errors, etc.

I also found it fun to use ChatGPT to generate descriptive 'image alt text' for scenes and then plug that text into ComfyUI and A1111 to generate images. There were some cases where I was generating patterns and would use it to give me long lists of ideas for things, like I'll ask it "give me 20 ideas for christmas-themed patterns" and it spits out a bunch of stuff like "merry reindeer." Some of it isn't exactly usable, but it's also easier to have ChatGPT generate 100+ ideas than to do that yourself, which becomes pretty tedious past ten (for me).

I'm looking into using it for language learning, although I trust it less than something like Duolingo, which I already don't trust. I'm wondering how I can 'chat' with it in a different language and make sure that it correctly corrects my grammar and is also using proper grammar itself. Not sure how useful that could be, but if anyone else has had success with this, I'm interested in hearing how.

>it became my notes app

This is exactly what it is for me - and I am currently trying to figure out things I can do to extend it as such.

One example is I wanted to learn how to understand the Spec Sheet released for the plasma engine that Neumann Space released, which led me down understanding Specific Impulse, the Rocket Algorythm and coming up with a formula for the math behind knowing when to flip an engine around to slow velocity such that you end up at a final velocity of choice (the orbital speed of the ISS)...

https://chat.openai.com/share/b43cca9d-0eeb-4ee0-9639-043c62...

Understand a lot more about orbital dynamics than I did before and am able to actually read the formulas now.

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I use it to venture down and add deeper context to things I am reading and commenting on.

For example being able to tie the genetic generational cycles of the migrations of monarch butterflies to 'reservoir' concepts in GPT

And gene sharing between plants via mycelial mushroom root networks

https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=38768578

I ask it to write regexes, and I've had it write code that follows known algorithms.

In general, I tend to ask Chat GPT questions when: 1: I don't know what to search for, and 2: When I need it to aggregate and interpret context.

I personally am not using Chat GPT daily. I find that I still prefer searching, because often I'm either trying to find a specific website; or the human discussion provides a lot more insight than ChatGPT can give me.

I took the list my wife gave me of her Christmas present requests and asked it to extrapolate other ideas. It did so quite successfully.

I used it to generate a balanced list of who gets to open which advent calendar because we have five kids and stupidly bought five advent calendars. It worked really well until the littles started stealing candy. I use to it check the tone of messages to my ex wife to ensure I’m not being too aggressive or combative. I use it to help generate basic letters to people I don’t really care about but want it to be formalish. Ie the landlord of my exwife who threw out a bunch of the kids stuff when asking permission to get it from the trash after exwife had been evicted. I’ve used it to help come up with silly ideas for kids story time at night. I use it almost everyday at work to check my code, emails, and any bullets I have to write about coworkers or myself.

Mine is a chrome plugin called LookupChatGPT (on Github and store) to send selected text to ChatGPT but with your own prompts. My main usage is here on HN, when I don't understand some new jargon or some complex idea I select that text, right click and do "what's this" which is a system prompt I have defined like "explain the given word or sentence or translate it. This is taken from webpage title: VAR_PAGE url: VAR_URL".

Can also just click the extension icon and ask a question, again using your own predefined prompt.

It popups up a box with response and a field to ask another question. I can re-request the response which is very helpful since you never know what's right.

Works for text selection from input boxes on a page but I don't use it that way much.

Recently used it to translate some Japanese tweets.

Made this extension mostly using GPT-4 so there is that too.

So many things...

- Write complex SQL queries

- Write Python GUI apps

- Write songs, heikus, and Christmas rhymes

- Write Delphi Object Pascal functions

- Write PHP, Javascript, HTML, CSS code

- Create SVG files and ASCII art

- Find bugs in PHP code, Kotlin code, and HTML syntax

- Create HTML/CSS layouts

- Write SEO outlines and blog posts

- Write synopsis of a potential fictional novel

- Write titles for user content in an AI mobile app

- Create UI layouts for Delphi Object Pascal

- Create strategic marketing plans for clients

- Create recipies for a list of ingredients

- Write bash scripts, PHP CLI commands, WinSCP CLI commands

- Write haproxy and Dockerfile configs

- Orchestrated a 70 server CPU/GPU cloud in programming languages I don't know

- Write Python Stable Diffusion image model pipeline code with Diffusers and PyTorch

- Researching romance novel tropes, driveway maintenence, eminent domain, Waldorf, treasury bonds

- Writing professional sounding emails

- Text summarization and analysis

- Stock and real estate data summarization and analysis

- Psuedo scaling algorithms

- Marketing copy

- Code conversion between languages (like C# to Delphi)

- Cost comparisons between signing a Cloudflare enterprise contract and not over 12 months

- Naming a novel brainstorming

and many many other things. A huge productivity multiplier. It's like having 1000 domain experts and junior devs on tap 24/7 that you don't have to hire off Upwork. Also have to be able to recognize when it produces trash.

Pretty similar to how a lot of people in IT are using it:

- Generating boilerplate code for a process - saving time and then just customizing basic code after feeding it an idea and some basic requirements

- Troubleshooting - especially on systems I'm not familiar with - this often gets me 95% of the way to a solution. Obviously not just copying & pasting scripts it spits out, but it's been very good at figuring out some obscure linux issues, oracle config issues, even 3rd party integration software.

- Meal prepping - give it a list of ingredients and preferences and have it spit out a plan on how to portion it out, make each different meal roughly equal nutrition-wise, plan out when and how to cook each piece on a day to make it the most efficient, and even generate a shopping list. Output it into a nice table and the hardest part is done.

Essentially automating project boilerplate that is custom enough to need attention, but not quite custom enough where it's interesting. Some examples include creating dockerfiles, various database models and data parsers, openapi specs, etc.

1) Helped me write a very quick and dirty python program to figure out all the possible combinations of 'little letters after a name' (phd, mba, ms, md, esq, etc) that make up a real word in English. Turns out, there's this whole fuzzy matching library in python that does most of the hard work for you. (Warning, this dumb idea is a big nerd snipe, spend your Xmas vacations on something fun)

2) Writing a novel. Newer (as in last month), versions of Claude and the like will now take in whole documents. For work, these are used to help generate better boilerplate. So, I can just upload a style guide and then an old manual to make a new manual to better conform to the style guides we've updated (>99% accuracy, really good actually!).

So, now I can just upload a working draft of a novel/movie script, the character dossiers, the overall plot (quite detailed scene by scene format though). It reads them all, and then spits out the next scene I ask it to. About an hour of polishing the results with the AI, and you have a whole act completed. I'm still going finding all the little tricks, but it's taken the work load down by at least 50x. You can get a B- level novel/script out in under two weeks, ready to send to out for review.

Idea for HNers out there: Take this new version that can read uploaded documents and sell it as a writing aide for all us needy-twitchy-worrywort-small-bit writers out there. Put some auto-incorporation into AO3 publishing too. At the very least, these things get rid of writer's block like nothing I've ever seen!

I built a GPT[1] and fed it tons of information about Go[2], and use that to help me code and, most of all, write tests. Been a huge help and increased my productivity in a significant way.

I also built a couple of tools using the API, allalt[3] being the most important, which I use to generate alt tags for images. I suck big time at describing images, so GPT-4V helps a ton. I'll probably extend it to use ollama[4] soon, so I can use uncensored models to describe NSFW images as well[5].

Speaking of notes, I also built brane[6], which is a command-line notes application I use to log what I do throughout the day. It integrates with GPT's API, so you can ask questions about your day or week; quite nice for reminding me of what I did that week, helps me a lot in therapy sessions.

Overall, GPT and ChatGPT improved my life quite a bit. Really happy with it and looking forward to a GPT-5 kind of thing and local models that can rival GPT-4.

[1] https://chat.openai.com/g/g-PAHVE3a64-moss-the-go-expert

[2] https://git.sr.ht/~jamesponddotco/moss

[3] https://git.sr.ht/~jamesponddotco/allalt

[4] https://ollama.ai/

[5] I do nude art photography on the side.

[6] https://git.sr.ht/~jamesponddotco/brane

used it yesterday to learn how to calculate the linear regression constants all the way from multivariable calc down to converting it into the standard statistical form. it hallucinated a few times but i knew enough to ignore that and learn some techniques. all up a fun exercise that i surely would have been stuck on if not for the few insights.

Outside of the the usual programming stuff that’s posted:

* cooking questions, like clarifying steps in recipes, asking for simple recipes

* conversation starters for long car rides

* games/activities for date night, family gatherings, kids

In most of these, it can occasionally be “wrong” (save maybe cooking, but I can use “common sense” to validate) and that’s perfectly acceptable.

I sometimes use it for questions about configuration around tooling, but I have pretty mixed success. I don’t know if it’s because I use the free version, or if it’s the training material for the subject matter, but it is wrong about 50% of the time unless I know how to ask it the right way.

I use it to improve work emails. Often time my messages read like a series of bullet points strung together, and ChatGPT will rewrite to make it flow a little more naturally.

At work we get pressured to write comments backing up our ratings on performance appraisals. Not just the overall performance, but aspects such as if the employee communicates effectively, works well with others, etc.. ChatGPT is good at generating those without sounding too repetitive.

I've also occasionally used it to generate a meal plan following a my diet.

Generally I use it to try and waste as much of Open AI and Microsoft's money as I possibly can. I try and get it to use the absolute maximum number of tokens as I possibly can for free doing pointless tasks, I use the image generation to produce the weirdest art I can without triggering the censorship and when I'm bored I just tell it as many lies as possible and make it treat them as truth.

I don't know if this is feeding into the training data or not but I hope that it is.

I use gpt APIs for a tool I am building.

link: https://ropuz.com

and using chatGPT webapp for code and almost everything.

  - board game rule clarifications
  - bash scripting
  - home improvement questions
  - cooking questions
  - third rail issues and opinion questions

Being able to talk to the model has been awesome for my conversational Spanish. I’m holding conversations and getting live corrections on my grammar.

Sometimes I need to search for something but can’t find the words for it. I can prompt something generally describing the concept.

I used it recently for the following:

- writing some un-avoidably inefficient SQL which required transforming 10 columns with _1-10 numerical suffix into one column

- creating some geo dummy data. I had a set of 10 pairs of lat-lon coords that I needed shifted 50 meters north-west. ChatGPT did it using an approximation method and worked well.

- creating a custom Python logger

As a junior developer to sketch scripts or simple methods. If often knows things that I don't know, because it read all the manuals and all of SO. It stops to be useful after the second or third iteration on the code when it becomes apparent that it knows the syntax and the examples but it doesn't understand the purpose.

No, I guess I'm a luddite that way.

But I may get into it from a SaaS perspective eg. get into the hype since there are customers.

I don't. I fear anything pre-made for me, say programming questions. I learned a lot by going through the documentation myself, and there is always the possibility to realize that I was after the wrong thing or asking the wrong question. LLMs let you be stupid, albeit very fast.

I showed it to my parent's along with showing them what SD can do. Just so they're aware of it.

I haven't use either much beyond that other than to try them out.

I have tried out locallama. And would like to see if I can mod that into a game.

No longer. Too lazy and censored. Stopped performing even mundane tasks. Cancelled my sub and have been using bard and jetbrains AI for code. Haven’t looked back.

Using both ChatGPT and some open models to handle or test some personal automations like todo list and calendar management and email sorting.

Also used for boilerplate code stuff.

I've been regularly using ChatGPT for translating technical documents. It does a great job, definitely better than Google Translate.

I sometimes use it when I'm lacking inspiration to craft polite LinkedIn or email response.

I’m using ChatGPT as a discussion forum/collective intelligence.

The GPT I built, Choir — https://choir.chat — learns from the prompts users write, so the performance keeps getting better and better.

Coding, debugging, random questions I would have searched on Google.

I am not using it, never have. I use open models.