Any real AI recommendations from the community?

I use copilot a lot when I code.

While it hasn't reached a point where it can full-blown substitute actual programmers, it has drastically boosted my productivity.

I think big part of it is that google search has become really bad. I used to be able to find answers to specific technical questions pretty fast. Now it's mostly a lost cause, while copilot is doing really well.

Code generation itself is pretty decent too, especially when you know what you are doing. You can keep "massaging" the output by making it change things and guiding it.

For public services, perplexity.ai is legitimately useful.

Language learning using AI is a very powerful tool too.

If you're fairly technically inclined, you can get really stellar results by building workflows using langchain or other similar libraries (instructor is also good). Setting problems up to be broken up into subproblems with the multiple solutions being checked in parallel, with the results being double checked and revised by other AIs, really cuts down on the effects of hallucinations. Combining that with function calling and external data has been proven (in my experience) to be close to and sometimes better than human work.

Claude AI by Anthropic has been my go to. I only touch chat gpt for simple stuff so I don't use up compute time with Claude.

It's helped me code/develop a whole new personal library catalog to catalog my physical books at home and helped me build a react website from scratch. It's been a fascinating learning experience.

Here's how I use these:

• Gamma: This is my preferred presentation format. I work with emails and whenever I had to use a design in a presentation, it is more frustrating to use than not. Not to mention how much effort it takes to create a presentation that looks good in Google Slides (haven't used Microsoft Office in a while, but I had the same problem). Yes, you can use templates, but even then, the tools didn't really work for me. Gamma makes presentations look good, and you can have it extend beyond the usual 4:3 presentation and look closer to a web page. Presentations can still be done, but most of the presentations I make are more quick-scan documents than a proper has-to-be-presented-on-a-screen presentation. I don't use the AI features much except for import, which works well enough to create a good-looking presentation, including structured content. But if I have to, I use ChatGPT for the content since I mostly work with that and then use Gamma for turning it into a great-looking presentation. I've used it for my portfolio and I've had clients compliment me on it because it looks so much more professional.

For ChatGPT, I use it in a few different ways daily. I am mindful about what information I put into it since I don't think it's very secure. I also don't use it for any factual information, but I do use it to find ideas/concepts that I can then go look up on my own. Here are some of the ways I use ChatGPT:

• Transcribing handwritten notes/printed text - My handwriting can be a hit or a miss, but usually it does a good job of getting the information and then organizing it the way I want it. I like keeping notes digitally, but sometimes writing is easier, and this helps to get some longer text. Other than that, when there's something like an ingredient label, I use it to transcribe that too and sort through what's in it.
• Product comparison - Speaking of labels, I use it a lot for product comparison. When online shopping and there are too many products for different prices at different quantities, using this to find me the cheapest option. It can also help me figure out what's exactly in a product, and then I verify that separately. I used this for skincare products recently.
• Understanding text - Other than just summarizing, I use it to understand jargon-heavy text like research papers in fields I'm unfamiliar with by helping me break down what's in it. I have it both simplify the language and define terms I don't know that I can then look up separately, or go through the sources it provides for the information to verify. This also works with code. I'm not a developer, but I have some basic knowledge. A client was having an odd issue with their email user database, for which I found relevant developer documentation, but I wasn't sure if that could be the problem. I had it compare the issue with the documentation to figure out what configuration might be an issue and some possible reasons for it. Once it did, I was able to share that to point them in the right direction to get a developer to look into it because it was a coding issue and not a platform issue.
• Analyzing my own writing - It is good at identifying patterns in my own writing that I sometimes don't notice. This takes me a bit of prompting to go beyond what's obvious, but when it works, it can be really insightful. Ideas that I may be circling, but haven't quite reached yet, or anything similar I might want to explore based on what I have shared. Claude can be better at this than ChatGPT out of the box. But ChatGPT can be too, depending on how you prime it with custom instructions - and it can be sometimes better if it has more context with memory.
• Learning assistance with study guides/schedules - Forgot to add this earlier, but I used this to break down an online course I was taking into a schedule that worked with the time I had, and had it give me additional resources I could look up for specific topics I was interested in, tying that into the schedule as well. All I gave was the course overview page with the modules and topics listed with the timings, let it know that I usually watch videos at 1.5x speed, and the sections I wanted to do more research on, and it was very helpful in creating a study schedule.

As an aside, I've also given ChatGPT some personality because I hate the default overly friendly way these LLMs write, so I have changed it to something I would actually want to interact with. It's better if you use Projects and reinforce with more instructions, and more context than you can store in Memory, which is capped at a certain number. Then, the conversations I am having come close to rivalling Claude (which has the similar 'emotional intelligence' of Pi, but more powerful). It can still revert to bot mode sometimes though, especially when it does a web search. This has been the biggest change in the way I use it, and I highly recommend using custom instructions at the very least, even if you don't end up using projects.

On rare occasion I use CoPilot to navigate my way through a codebase I'm not going to be sticking around in.

Lately my hobby project is making a simple editor for a pseudo 3D engine, but I couldn't figure out how to approach clicking to select an object. The renderer isn't much help here. You feed it a scene graph and it writes to an HTML Canvas or to an SVG all by itself. There's no hint of what areas of screen space correspond to what chunks of the scene. I found a mostly finished editor for the same engine that does what I want, but it was a large bunch of React that I couldn't parse.

Feed the whole codebase into CoPilot, and it points me at an external library. Feed the library into it, and apparently it's doing color testing on a separately rendered copy with unique colors for each object. And now I've got an approach I can bring back to my codebase.