Phind co-founder here. May I ask why you’re considering dropping Phind and what we can do to improve?

Two main things:

1. It sits in the "money for AI" fund from me. Ie it competes with ChatGPT. While it uses OpenAI in the background, i have not found it to be as complete and useful as ChatGPT directly. I did cancel ChatGPT for a couple months to try out Phind instead because Phind can search, and i find that missing from ChatGPT of course (at least until they have the module back). I'm on the pro plan of Phind, fwiw.

Hypothetically it could (maybe, i'm assuming) be as valuable for my ChatGPT use cases, but i found that i couldn't just give it the same input i'd give ChatGPT, as Phind would then search for an answer and come back with.. well, things from the internet which wasn't what i was wanting from that ChatGPT interface. I struggle to think of an example, though.. so hopefully this vague description is still of use hah.

2. Where Phind excels of course is digging answers out of the web, finding API solutions, wiring those results up into code, etc. However unfortunately this still seems a complex task. I do not find Phind to be accurate enough. It usually does a decent job at inferring the solution from the results, but it struggles with knowing library versions, context of the search results, etc.

I find myself using Phind primarily as a quick jumping off point for search results.. but i still often need to still search myself to figure out the actual code. So when i feel like i still need to search anyway, and that i feel i gave up ChatGPT for Phind (due to item #1), then it's just a tough position to justify Phind over CGPT for me.

For context usually i'm using and searching about Rust.

Fwiw i've still not decided one way or another. Though i'm definitely on the fence. Hope this vague and off the top of my head post helps a bit.

Thanks for the detailed feedback.

We see Phind as a superset of ChatGPT. For the problems where search results may not be relevant, it should still function as GPT-4. Do you see it performing worse in your use case?

As for mistaken library versions, we’re working on developing our own index as a long term fix. But in the meantime you should be able to tell it the proper version and it should work.

So our hope is that Phind is a complete ChatGPT replacement for devs. Soon we’ll be rolling out our own models alongside GPT-4 that will bring additional speed and quality improvements.

I’d be happy to chat further with you directly, my email is michael(at)phind.com

> We see Phind as a superset of ChatGPT. For the problems where search results may not be relevant, it should still function as GPT-4. Do you see it performing worse in your use case?

I did, but honestly i've not tried it in a while. I'll keep this in mind and try to give it a go again before i cancel/go back to CGPT.

> As for mistaken library versions, we’re working on developing our own index as a long term fix. But in the meantime you should be able to tell it the proper version and it should work.

That is true, i rarely give it my library versions. Though, i feel what's needed is frequently versions are ambiguous in results. In the case of something like Rust, i would take a search result, go to docs.rs/foo and see if those results exist in the lib. Usually that's the mismatched step, something i'm unsure if Phind is doing at all.

I'll try giving it versions more frequently, though.

Unrelated side note: i'd love if Phind had nothing user/pass auth or at the very least much longer valid logins. Using email on multiple devices is a bit annoying for me. For me (i use anonymous emails) it's all the downsides of auth, but plus email validation every time hah. Though this is not making me cancel or anything, i just had to login again and figured i'd vent my small annoyance :)

Gotcha, would love to hear once you do try it again.

Does it really kick you out every time you visit? Login sessions should last for at least two weeks. Do you have any privacy settings that might be interfering with our cookie?

Oh definitely not every time i visit, it's probably working as designed. It's just that across ~5 devices it feels frequent. Plus logging into other devices is made more difficult by this email-only option. Just my own personal gripe, it's probably unique to me haha.

you can also use https://github.com/smol-ai/GodMode to run chatgpt and phind side by side fyi

I've usually clicked on the links that Phind provides as a source. Don't you find them useful?

I do, in so far as it usually reveals where Phind failed for me. Ie "Why does it think that method should exist? Oh, this search result has an unrelated library using that method - and it got confused" sort of thing.

Off the top of my head i think if the link is correct, Phind is correct.

It's a tough problem though. I suspect the difficulty lies in a lot of search results not containing the appropriate versions/etc at all. So you have to go to secondary/etc steps of looking up library APIs and knowing that the two are incompat.