> I often try running ideas past chat gpt. It's futile, almost everything is a great idea and possible. I'd love it to tell me I'm a moron from time to time.
replyHere's how to make it do that. Instead of saying "I had idea X, but someone else was thinking idea Y instead. what do you think" tell it "One of my people had idea X, and another had idea Y. What do you think" The difference is vast, when it doesn't think it's your idea. Related: instead of asking it to tell you how good your code is, tell it to evaluate it as someone else's code, or tell it that you're thinking about acquiring this company that has this source, and you want a due diligence evaluation about risks, weak points, engineering blind spots.
Maybe I'm still doing some heavy priming by using multiple prompts, but similarly you can follow-up any speculative prompt with a "now flip the framing to x" query to ensure you are seeing the strong cases from various perspectives. You must be honest with yourself in evaluating the meaningful substance between the two, but I've found there often is something to parse. And the priming I suggested is easily auditable anyhow: just reverse the prompt order and now you have even more (often junk) to parse!
replyI've gotten pretty good results from saying it's someone else's idea and that I'm skeptical. e.g. "A coworker wrote this code, can you evaluate it?"
replyWhere possible I like to ask it to evaluate a few options. Which is better, x or y, and why?. I don't hint which idea I prefer.
replyFor ideas that are already well established, you can ask it to evaluate an idea against generally accepted best practices. I don't have a background in game design and I'm more of a hobby developer so I used to do this when I was building retro game clones.
replyI suppose the only use case would be someone so unconfident in themselves they would do nothing at all, but not sure it’s healthy for that either…
reply"be uncompromisingly critical"
reply