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My failure rate with Cursor’s IDE that’s familiar with my codebase is substantially lower than just GPT-4

Most people shitting on GPT-4 are not really using it in the right context.




> Most people shitting on GPT-4 are not really using it in the right context.

Old excuse: "You're Holding It Wrong" (Apple's Response to the iPhone 4 antenna problem)

> https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/

New excuse: "You are not using GPT-4 in the right context."


I can relate to that statement despite being a hardcore proponent of GPT-4. In a way, the GPT-4 as queried expertly; and the GPT-4 as queried inexpertly/free ChatGPT are dramatically different beasts with a vast gap in capability. It's almost like two different products, in a way, where the former is basically in alpha/beta state and can be only incidentally and unreliabily tapped into through the OpenAI API or ChatGPT Plus.

IMO, it's not fair to beat people over the head with "you're holding it wrong" arguments. Until and unless we get a prompt-rewriting engine that reprocesses the user query into something more powerful automatically (or LLMs' baseline personality capabilities get better), "holding it wrong" is an argument that may be best rephrased in a way that aims to fill the other person's gaps in knowledge, or not said at all.


And then the iPhone antenna was fixed and adoption only increased and the product only became better.

You’re being unreasonably harsh on a piece of tech that is barely a year old.


I'm not sure what the point is in your comparison - is your point that GPT-4 will become overwhelmingly popular with further refinement?

The iPhone was pretty successful, and the iPhone 4 was arguably the best one that had been released until that point.


> is your point that GPT-4 will become overwhelmingly popular with further refinement?

My point is that people have a tendency to come up with really sketchy insults (blame the user that he uses the product in a wrong way) to people who find and can expound legitimate points of criticism of a product.


Eh, probably a poor example considering the iPhone 4 was hardly a flop and was still broadly considered the best smartphone out at the time. The people who thought this was a total-showstopper were, on the whole, probably wrong.

Counter-example: lots of people said an on-screen keyboard would never really work when the original iPhone was being released.


> Eh, probably a poor example considering the iPhone 4 was hardly a flop and was still broadly considered the best smartphone out at the time. The people who thought this was a total-showstopper were, on the whole, probably wrong.

At least in Germany among tech nerds, the iPhone 4 and Steve Jobs become topics of insane ridicule because of this incident.


Well it appears that ridicule from the German tech nerds isn’t a good predictor of product success then




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