alt Hacker NewsLast month I rebuilt my pool's plumbing system with the help of YouTube and GPT. I was quoted $6k and it ended up costing me about $1k of materials and a few days of work. This was my first exposure to any kind of outdoor plumbing, I'd never touched PVC before.
It's unlikely I would have had the confidence to do it from YouTube alone, specific diagnostic help and a full diagram to work off of was extremely helpful. I had it prepare an SVG of the whole assembly with all the measurements and parts labeled.
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> This was my first exposure to any kind of outdoor plumbing, I'd never touched PVC before.
I find it telling that the highest praise for LLMs comes from people using it for something where they admittedly have very little domain knowledge. Domain experts usually mention major caveats. I've been testing them on subjects where I already understand the problem well, and I've yet to see any outputs that would make me trust them on things I don't already know.
It’s likely it missed some crucial subtlety that will come to bite you in the ass down the line.
That’s the thing with AI - its responses sound plausible enough to non-experts but time and time again I see experts in any given field being able to identify AI content by pinpointing subtle but crucial errors. That’s one of its dangers - it gives you enough confidence to shoot yourself in the foot.
> It's unlikely I would have had the confidence to do it from YouTube alone, specific diagnostic help and a full diagram to work off of was extremely helpful.
People have been DIYing swimming pools for decades with the help of… books:
* https://www.amazon.com/COMPLETE-GUIDE-SWIMMING-CONSTRUCTION-...
Where do you think ChatGPT got its information from?
Fellow pool owner who has always drawn the line at “only pros do the pvc cutting”. I’d love to hear more.
In the 90s and prior you could have done the same thing using the public library.
I feel like if you had wanted to you could have done it before. When I got a pool in 2020,there were still old school phpBB forums out there dedicated to DIY and maintenance. That same summer, my neighbour who in no way is techie or handy redid his plumbing too.
I've love to know more about how you did this. Was it the underground plumbing or your pump system above ground. This is one of the few areas of the home I have little understanding of.
I hope what you’ll discover to be wrong needs only $5000 of repairs.
I'm glad it went well for you. But I run a not-for-profit pinball museum, and I have specifically had to ban volunteer repairpeople from using the chatbots because it will confidently propose idiotically wrong solutions. Which will then get proposed to me, or just directly applied, with equal confidence. At this point I'd rather hear, "My horoscope said..." than "ChatGPT said..."
I expect that it's good for common use cases that's well documented. But then, so are a lot of other approaches.