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Comment by a_square_peg | Hacker News Reader

ChatGPT has already saved me from hours of Googling when I'm trying to find out how to do certain things. It almost feels magical - I don't have to read through half-dozen slightly different variations of what I need to do.

Before ChatGPT, to find the answer to things like "how do I set up Gunicorn to run as a daemon that restarts when it fails" I would have to endure hours of googling, snarky stack-overflow comments that I shouldn't do that, etc., but as a solopreneur without access to a more senior engineer to ask, it's been fantastic. I've been quite skeptical of machine learning/AI claims but I feel like I'm experiencing a genuine case of a technology that's proving to be so much more useful than I had imagined.

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I know this is just an example, but I think it’s emblematic of the main issue I have with the widespread use of LLMs.

Do you mean, “have Gunicorn keep N workers running?” If so, that’s in the manual (timeouts to kill silent workers, which defaults to 30 seconds).

Or do you mean “have Gunicorn itself be monitored for health, and restarted as necessary?” There are many ways to do that – systemctl, orchestration platforms like K8s, bespoke scripts – and all of them have tricky failure mechanisms that a casual copy/paste will not prepare you for.

Blindly using answers from ChatGPT is no different than a random SO post, and you are no more prepared for failure when the abstractions leak.

This is also my current worry. If you know the concepts (Not the workflow) about the problem you’re solving, I find it easy to get answer, and in the meantime you’ll collect some new knowledge in the process. even when asking someone, they will often point out the knowledge you lack while providing the answers.

Getting straight answers will be detrimental in the long term, I fear. It feels like living in a box, and watching the world on a screen and the person answering my questions is mixing lies and truths.

read this

> snarky stack-overflow comments that I shouldn't do that,

and realized they're probably using the chatgpt equivalent: nice, corporate answers that you probably shouldn't use

Well you're no longer "solo" as an entrepreneur. It's like hiring an indefatigable intern to do all the research and lashing together somewhat useful code, solutions, etc.

do you feel like you are missing out on a learning opportunity when you aren't doing hours of research? sometimes I come up with other good ideas or learn of new things amidst researching a problem

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