[ThePhysicist]

You just talk to it like you would talk to another engineer. I e.g. first describe what I want to achieve and ask it to give me an architecture. I then e.g. ask to break down the work into different smaller tasks, and ask it to do each task, adding to what it wrote before. A bit hard to reproduce all prompts here and the UI doesn't allow to share, but it comes quite natural I find. Sometimes you need to ask it to continue as the output just stops, but other than that it's like talking to a colleague (with superhuman powers).

[sumtechguy]

I usually ask it to describe the concept first. To make sure it is in the right space. Then I say something like "please write a c++ version of that".

It will do a decent job at it.

Last night a friend who refuses to get an account to use it was having an issue with a cisco router. I put in what he was trying to do. It was not right and gave him an error. I fed that error back in and it realized he had a different version and gave me a better way to do exactly what he wanted. It had kept the context and said 'oh some routers do not have that command here is another way to do it'. He had spent weeks googling around for the answer. I had it in under a half hour and I had never used the interface he was changing before.

Then you can turn around and ask it to write a horror story about a monster that devours couches. It will make something up (it is very good at that). Then you can say 'oh put that in the style of the SCP foundation'. It will.

This tool is wildly interesting. I think dismissing it is a bad idea. I look forward to using this thing as it gets better.

[californical]

I have been trying this, but it crashes every single time. I end up getting a huge amount of output, but I’m guessing that it exceeds the time limit and crashes losing the entire output.

Maybe I’m using it wrong, but I just describe the system that I want to build and it starts listing out multiple files. Usually by the 3rd or 4th file, it crashes with an error.

I’m not sure how to reduce the output so it doesn’t crash! I have ChatGPT Plus using GPT4, fwiw.

Did you have this problem too, and do you remedy by giving it smaller bits of information per question?

[ThePhysicist]

Just write "You were interrupted, please continue." - that will prompt it to pick up its train of thoughts and continue. Strange times we live in...

[robocat]

It seems a lot of prompts are polite (e.g. “please”). Weird, since I don’t think we ask Google politely?

How does being polite in your prompts help you?

[raylad]

It makes a big difference with Bing bot.

Try a prompt where you want it to create a list of something in two versions:

* Create a list of the top 20 blah sorted by blah

It will typically return just a few and then refuse to give you more. Then try:

* Acting as a conscientious and resourceful research assistant, use your knowledge and initiative to create a list of the top 20 blah sorted by blah.

You get much better results.

Lately I find that you can reduce its hallucinations somewhat by adding something like:

* If you are unsure of any information put in "??". Do not fabricate information. I understand that not all information is available and appreciate your work.

This is all a bit much - having to coddle an AI, but it's possible to understand why it would be the case: it's trained on lots of human interactions and apparently responds better to a friendly interaction with keywords that set it up to do a good job.

[eric-hu]

The South Park: Post Covid special had Amazon Alexa androids who were girlfriends to some characters. The boyfriend had to walk on eggshells with some topics or Alexa would go into a screaming fit.

Kind of prescient.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lugeruSbnAE