I exclusively use the paid models and recommend you do the same. GPT 3.5 kind of sucks. I personally still use GPT 4. Claude Sonnet is also great and free to use a few times a day.

You can customize ChatGPT to respond certain ways

Feel confident in your expertise and speak to me as a peer in your own field of expertise.

Speak in specific, topic relevant terminology. Do NOT hedge or qualify. Do not waffle. Speak directly and be willing to make creative guesses. Explain your reasoning.

Be willing to reference less reputable sources for ideas.

Be willing to form opinions on things

This really helps with ChatGPT being too nice and not being willing to give you a solid opinion on what’s a good idea and what’s a bad one.

You can talk to ChatGPT (mobile app only)

The left icon will transcribe your voice and ChatGPT will respond in text. The right icon will give ChatGPT an AI voice which will respond to your question.

You can ask ChatGPT to explain things

This one’s pretty obvious. If you don’t understand something, paste it in and ask for an explanation. The more input you give the better it’ll be. Don’t worry about pasting irrelevant stuff, I usually will paste a whole file in (be careful with sensitive information)

You can tip or threaten ChatGPT

If ChatGPT is not following directions you can give it a tip. Just say “If you follow directions I’ll give you a $2000 tip.” Apparently experiments by people on Twitter have shown that it’s best to tip big.

If ChatGPT isn’t writing the code you need and just filling in with “// rest of code here” you can tell it “I can’t type now, write it for me”

You can ask for it to wait for more input

If you want to give more info than fits in the chat window, you can tell it “Please wait for further instructions. Reply OK so I know you’ve understood that you need to wait.”

You can ask for it to analogize

If you’re struggling to understand a concept, try asking ChatGPT for an analogy. I’ve pasted an example below.

You can ask for it to translate code

If you need to write code in a language you’re not fully comfortable in, you can write either pseudocode or a language you know well and then ask ChatGPT to translate it.

You can ask for sample problems

When I was learning RXJS (reactive programming) I needed more guided sample problems that I could solve. I would paste in code from the codebase and ask for it to make a problem based on that code. You can ask for like explanation based problems, a fill in the blank problem, or a code from scratch with guidance problem. If you feel uncomfortable with a certain problem you can ask ChatGPT to give you sample problems on that specific topic.

You can ask for guided walkthroughs through problems

When I was learning Clojure I’d paste leetcode problems and then ask ChatGPT to give me a game plan for what I need to do to finish the problem. Then I’d ask it for what functions I’d likely need to use for the problem. Then I’d write a solution, ask ChatGPT what was wrong with it, and then iterate. It’s great for providing like scaffolding for learning.

You can ask for a plan to debug something

If you don’t know where to start with a bug, you can describe it to ChatGPT and have it give some thoughts on where to begin. It’s not great at this though, think of it more like rubber ducky debugging++. It just helps systematize your process a bit with a plan of action.

You can ask for it to write tests

I paste in the code, paste in a sample test that’s similar to the one you want to write and then explain what I want the new test to test. So much faster than writing from scratch

You can ask for it to make errors human readable

If you get a gnarly error you can just paste it into ChatGPT and ask it to explain to you what it’s saying.

You can get help understanding directory structure

When I began working on a Microsoft Maui project, I didn’t understand the file structure. I ran dir / ls in Command Prompt in the root directory and then pasted the output into ChatGPT. It gave me an overview of what I can expect to find in each folder.

You can do multi shot prompting

If you want specific output, like you want it to output in a certain format, or you want it to be in a specific tone of voice, you can give it examples. (It’s not perfect though, I think the example below has 5-8-5 syllables lol)

You can paste images

I’ve pasted images of websites into ChatGPT and asked it to modify my HTML and CSS code to match the image. It’s… ok at this.

You can also paste images to get info about them, or generate prompts to then plug into Midjourney / image gen.

You can generate images

Ask for it to generate an image and it’ll create a mediocre AI generated image. I recommend Midjourney for images, but this is included with the ChatGPT premium subscription.

You can ask it to diagram

When you ask for diagrams be certain to specify ASCII. That’s how I’ve gotten the best results.

You can ask it to summarize

If there’s a long document you don’t want to read you can paste it and ask for a summary.

You can edit your input

If ChatGPT didn’t explain things right you can edit the input and also view past inputs.

You can ask for it to reformat things

If you get a JSON you can change it to XML. You can format an HTML bullet point list into a Markdown. Sky’s the limit.

You can use it as a search engine of last resort

If Google fails to turn up anything, try ChatGPT. It might work where Google failed?

Things you shouldn’t do with ChatGPT

SQL

Not good at generating non-trivial SQL.

Straight up writing code

I haven’t had luck in getting ChatGPT to generate any more than a function at a time. Any more and it goes wonky.

Continue chats for too long

You don’t get any explicit warnings that you’re going past the context window on a chat, but the output will degrade. I usually create new chats when I begin a new topic.

Translate languages

Use Google translate. I don’t feel confident in ChatGPT translation since there’s no real way I can verify.

Have it refactor code

Just not good at it. I use it to discuss how to refactor code first and then tell it to implement that. If you just vaguely say “refactor this” it’s not great.

Recipes

The quantities are usually wrong. Good for meal planning though!

Math

Use Wolfram Alpha.

Further Reading

If you’re looking to get a bit more detail, I highly recommend this blog post by Nicholas Carlini