Large Language Models took the world by storm in late 2022. This is a post that I’ll use simply to track the ways I’ve been using chatGPT (or other models) successfully.

Tell me how to create an API with AWS that takes an S3 URL and responds with a presigned URL

This was a great example of how chatGPT works nicely not only to write code, but also to guide you step-by-step in debugging your code, setting up multiple AWS services (a Lambda and an API Gateway), integrating them, fixing permissions, testing your solution end to end, etc. In my opinion this is one of the use cases where the tool really shines thanks to the possibility of interacting with it - it’s like a (stupid, but very knowledgeable) live support chat.

Re-format an ugly and messy list (copied from an HTML page) and convert it to markdown (2023-04-01)

I used this to quickly format this post copying straight from Goodreads. A menial task that I would have done manually.

Here's the chat.

Hi. This is a (badly formatted) list of books with title, author, and other information.

cover	title	author	rating	date read	date added Down arrow
The City and the Stars
The City and the Stars
Clarke, Arthur C.
1 of 5 stars2 of 5 stars3 of 5 stars[ 4 of 5 stars ]5 of 5 stars
Jul 30, 2022 [edit]
Jul 19, 2022
edit
view »
Remove from my books
The October Country
The October Country
Bradbury, Ray
1 of 5 stars2 of 5 stars3 of 5 stars[ 4 of 5 stars ]5 of 5 stars
Jul 19, 2022 [edit]
Jul 17, 2022
edit
view »
Remove from my books
The Sundial
The Sundial
Jackson, Shirley
1 of 5 stars2 of 5 stars3 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars[ 5 of 5 stars ]
Jul 09, 2022 [edit]
Jul 09, 2022
edit
view »
Remove from my books
[...]

Could you format this list this way in markdown:

  1. Title, Author where the author is in italics and the title is bold? Put the list in a code block.

Certainly! Here is the reformatted list in Markdown with the author and title in bold:

1. **The City and the Stars**, _Arthur C. Clarke_
1. **The October Country**, _Ray Bradbury_
1. **The Sundial**, _Shirley Jackson_
[...]

It was able to parse the crazily formatted list, extract the correct entities, and even re-write the author as “Name Surname” instead of “Surname, Name” (I didn’t request it explicitly but it was a nice touch). To be fair it started spouting nonsense (books that were not in my list 🙄) after item 16. So I split the input list in two and it worked flawlessly.

Write down a very rough draft of an article

This works quite nicely. Of course it’s only a skeleton of an article, and the related works are mostly bullshit (for the most part, they are not real articles).

Asking what is precisely the difference between different Computer Vision datasets

Good for a quick survey on some datasets I was interested in.

Expand a few points into a nicely written paragraph

One of the killer applications. The prose is a bit bland and sometimes uselessly verbose, but it’s generally more than acceptable, and often better than a non-native English speaker would do unless they put really honest effort into it.