Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by DenisM 263 days ago
Wow, I had useless results asking “please summarize important points of the discussion” from ChatGPT. It just doesn’t understand what’s important, and instead of highlighting pivoting moments of the conversation it produce a high level introduction for a non-practitioner.

Can you share you prompt?

1 comments

Honestly, I just type out something by hand that is roughly like what I quoted above - I'm not big on keeping prompt libraries.

I think the important part is to give it (in my case, these days "it" is gpt-5-codex) a target persona, just like giving it a specific problem instead of asking it to be clever or creative. I've never asked it for a summary of a long conversation without the context of why I want the summary and who the intended audience is, but I have to imagine that helps it frame its output.