Software tools
- The kinds of things I describe in my post on useful tech you might not realise exist unless someone tells you.
- Search engines generally aren’t helpful for answering vague questions like “what’s the right tool for doing X” but LLMs are!
- My impression is that people massively under-use LLMs in their day-to-day. Other things I use LLMs for:
- Proofreading long documents (beware that in my experience it will hallucinate even when heavily propmted not to and miss some points, but did surface some issues that I wouldn’t have spotted otherwise)
- Replying to emails
- Transcription of images, cleaning up text copied from PDFs
- Answering basic legal / tax questions
- Making English worksheets for tutees (have found that for maths often the problems are too hard/easy and Dr Frost works great anyway)
- Figuring out keyboard shortcuts / how to do things in online software like GDocs
- Corwriting boring documents, e.g. a participants’ agreement for a weekend retreat I’m running
- The key here is to get it to redraft and redraft until it looks like how you want. Or just make the changes yourself, if you know what to change it to – cf Cunningham’s Law, maybe the best way to write a doc well is to have an LLM write it badly first.
- Coming up with recipe ideas given time & ingredient constraints
- Doing interview preparation e.g. by uploading some articles I was meant to read in advance, explaining them, and suggesting potential questions I’d be asked
- Reviewing my code and suggesting improvements to it (ChatGPT voice mode is very good for practising explaining your thinking out loud as you’re doing it and getting feedback)
- Reconstructing names of people/companies/concepts I misheard but know the context of
- Responding to customer service email threads where the other person really just isn’t understanding my point (see next section about complaints) – just paste in the whole thread and tell it to write a reply
- You can then open a new window and pretend you’re the customer service agent asking for what to reply with! This is great for pre-empting their objections and also making sure you’re being reasonable. Might also be good for times when you’re asking LLMs for social advice (although in those cases you’re usually describing the situation rather than pasting in the objective facts from a single email chain, and so you’re probably at risk of distorting reality in addition to getting a sycophantic answer.) Sometimes prompting with “are you totally sure? isn’t the opposite true?” will surface considerations you hadn’t thought of, though obviously it’s not that helpful for coming to a judgement.
- (I don’t really use them for academic work because they seem to be pretty bad at doing philosophy & explaining economic intuitions. They’re OK as rubber ducks for me to explain & zoom in on confusion to though, and they’re sometimes helpful for formulating thought experiments.)
- Perplexity is great for quick answers to numeric questions (e.g. “how much was Airtable valued at in its last fundraising round?”) and finding films/books from a very vague description
- See also Elizabeth’s writeup
- Calendar scheduling links make arranging calls easy!
- Task management systems e.g. Todoist
- Streamlit for quickly making slick UIs for web apps in Python
Other magic
- You can set up a limited company in the UK; if you’re making a company in the US it should be a Delaware LP; etc
- FOI requests are useful, if you don’t get a reply you can complain to the ICO and push them on it if their response isn’t good enough
- Write complaints and ask for compensation (use Claude to draft the messages); Resolver is sometimes a time-saver here
- I hadn’t heard of it until recently but Patrick McKenzie describes this as adopting the tone of a “dangerous professional”. I think I arrived at it through the route of “eleven-year-old who’s spent too much time reading about the Consumer Contract Regulations in Which? & enjoys citing legal clauses with fancy section names”, but in any case it often works.
- You can have initial consultations with lawyers, or even hire them