Ask HN: What do you use ChatGPT / Claude for?
I think ChatGpt has ~200M users. I know it's a general purpose tool with people using it for all sorts of things - google search replacements for questions, coding assistance, drafting content, etc.
What do you guys most use it for (especially if you're not an engineer? I'm curious how it's being by folks in all these other professions - consulting, medicine, law, recruiting, finance, etc. Mostly for boiler plate code/text. Also for initial research about a topic—-thereafter, I do my own probing elsewhere and also ask follow-up questions based on my findings. It's a also a great place to ask a dumb question about anything and get a "seemingly" sensible answer without having to feel that you were judged for it. All in all, it's a feel-good tool :D Ever since I read that thread [0] about how AI companions are helping reduce loneliness, I started using ChatGPT and Claude just for casual conversations, similar to how I used to chat with friends on Discord. I initially used them for coding help, but now I often max out my message limits just chit-chatting, especially since the larger models are great for that. The only thing holding me back is the message limits—ChatGPT and Claude often tell me I’ve hit a cooldown, or when the conversation gets too long, I’m prompted to start a new one and lose context. As these models improve, I think I’ll use them more and more for conversation, treating them as characters to talk to rather than just tools like most people do. Sounds like you'd like https://character.ai/ Would Gemini pro be better for that perhaps? It has a much bigger context window. I work in marketing. Record a loom video. Copy the transcript. Go to Claude, “Summarize key bullet points” + paste the transcript. Share the loom + Claude output together. Use ChatGPT to write a script to automate some stuff with Google Apps Script + Asana API. Ask it to catch errors and email me a detailed error log if the script crashes. Script crashes and I just paste the error log into ChatGPT. Get a new better working version of the script. I am back to being a child asking a million questions about everything. It’s so much more rewarding to be curious when you get straightforward answers instead of SEO spam. I love that I can ask follow-up questions. It also saves me a lot of docs and StackOverflow lookups. I started asking about things I know the answer to in case I missed a library feature or a more elegant approach.