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While these folks waste breath debating whether AI is useful, I’m going to be over here…using it. I use AI 100 times a day as a coder and 10,000 times a day in

While these folks waste breath debating whether AI is useful, I’m going to be over here…using it. I use AI 100 times a day as a coder and 10,000 times a day in scripts. It’s enabled two specific applications I’ve built which wouldn’t be possible at single-person scale. There’s something about the psychology of some subset of the population that insists something isn’t working when it isn’t _quite_ working. They did this with Wikipedia. It was evident that Wikipedia was 99% great for years before this social contingent was ready to accept it.

Mistletoe 2y ago
But please accept that you are in a small subset of people that it is very useful to. Every time I hear someone championing AI, it is a coder. AI is basically useless to me, it is just a convoluted expensive google search.
- tossandthrow 2y ago
  I use ai to care for my plants, to give me recipes for pan pancakes, to help me fix my coffee machine. LLMs as a popularized thing is just about 2 years old. It is still mainly early adopters. For smartphones it might have taken 10 to 15 years to gain widespread traction. I think it is safe to say that we are only scratching the surface.
  - giraffe_lady 2y ago
    These are not categories that needed this change or benefit from it. Specific plant care is one of the easiest things to find information about. And are you serious you couldn't find a pancake recipe? The coffee machine idk it depends on what you did. But the other two are like a parody of AI use cases. "We made it slightly more convenient, but it might be wrong now and also burns down a tree every time you use it."
    - qup 2y ago
      > "We made it slightly more convenient, but it might be wrong now and also burns down a tree every time you use it." Sounds like early criticisms of the internet. I assume you mean he should be doing those things with a search engine, but maybe we shouldn't allow that either. Force him to use a book! It may be slightly less convenient, and could still be wrong, but...
      - tossandthrow 2y ago
        I ought to ask my dead grandma to save a kg of co2.
      - giraffe_lady 2y ago
        Before crypto and AI computing in general and the internet in particular were always an incredible deal in terms of how much societal value we get out of it for the electricity consumed.
  - Loughla 2y ago
    >It is still mainly early adopters. I just disagree with this. Every b2b or saas is marketing itself as using hallucination free AI. We're waaaaayyyyyy past the early adoption stage, and the product hasn't meaningfully improved.
  - coffeebeqn 2y ago
    I also use it for plant care tips. What should I feed this plant and what kind of soil to use and all the questions I never bothered to Google and crawl through some long blog article on
- davidmurdoch 2y ago
  Do you not use it to try learning new things? I use it to help get familiar with new software (recently for FreeCAD), or new concepts (passive speaker crossover design).
- josh2600 2y ago
  Wow, this is a wild opinion. I wonder how many people you’ve talked to about this? I know tons of people in my social groups that love AI and use it every day in it’s current form.
- herval 2y ago
  it's _extremely_ useful for lawyers, arguably even more so than for coders, given how much faster they can do stuff. They're also extremely useful for anyone who writes text and wants a reviewer. Also capable to execute most daily activities of some roles, such as TPMs. It's still useful to a small subset of all those professions - the early adopters. Same way computers were useful to many professionals before the UI (but only a small fraction of them had the skillset to use terminals)
  - singleshot_ 2y ago
    > it's _extremely_ useful for lawyers, How so? How are you using LLMs to practice law? Genuinely curious.
    - herval 2y ago
      multiple lawyer friends I know are using chatgpt (and custom gptees) for contract reviews. They upload some guidelines as knowledge, then upload any new contract for validation. Allegedly replaces hours of reading. This is a large portion of the work, in some cases. Some of them also use it to debate a contract, to see if there's anything they overlooked or to find loopholes. LLMs are extremely good at that kind of constrained creativity mode where they _have_ to produce something (they suck at saying "I dont know" or "no"), so I guess it works as sort of a "second brain" of sorts, for those too. There's even reported cases of entire legislations being written with LLMs already [1]. I'm sure there's thousands more we haven't heard about - the same way researchers are writing papers w/ LLMs w/o disclosing it [1] https://olhardigital.com.br/2023/12/05/pro/lei-escrita-pelo-chatgpt-no-rs-gera-repercussao-internacional-qual-e-o-limite/ https://olhardigital.com.br/2023/12/05/pro/lei-escrita-pelo-...
      - rsynnott 2y ago
        Five years later, when the contract turns out to be defective, I doubt the clients are going to be _thrilled_ with “well, no, I didn’t read it, but I did feed it to a magic robot”. Like, this is malpractice, surely?
- y1n0 2y ago
  My wife uses it almost as much as me which isn’t quite daily. She is not a coder whatsoever. I’ll ask her what her use cases are and reply here later if I don’t forget.
  - y1n0 2y ago
    She uses gpt as an editor for her emails and web content. she’ll just say "improve this," she gets options for how she might say something in a different way. When preparing for a summit, she gave it a list of broad topics she wanted to cover. Gpt generated a list of specific titles and descriptions for her talks. This in turn gave her specific ideas to write talks about instead of just the broad topic. When she wasn’t sure about the sequence of her talks, she asked GPT for advice on the order. GPT suggested an arrangement that created a logical flow and the reasoning for that flow, which ended up being pretty good. She often uses gpt as a sounding board for ideas. She said she likes having an always-available colleague to bounce thoughts off of.
- School-Cotton 2y ago
  Walk into any random coffee shop in America where people are working on their laptops and you will see some subset of them on ChatGPT. It’s definitely not just coders who are finding it useful.
- Ukv 2y ago
  Particularly given the article's target is "systems based on large neural networks" and not specifically LLMs, I'd claim there are a vast number of uncontroversially beneficial applications: language translation, video transcription, material/product defect detection, weather forecasting/early warning systems, OCR, spam filtering, protein folding, tumor segmentation, drug discovery and interaction prediction, etc.
- stickfigure 2y ago
  > convoluted expensive google search I'd call it a working google search, unlike, you know, google these days. Actually google's LLM-based search results have been getting better, so maybe this isn't the end of the line for them. But for sophisticated questions (on noncoding topics!) I still always go to chatgpt or claude.
  - coliveira 2y ago
    > google's LLM-based search results have been getting better don't worry, Google WILL change this because they don't make money when people find the answer right away. They want people to see multiple ads before leaving the site.
- FrustratedMonky 2y ago
  It's being used in drive through windows. In movies, in graphic design, pod casts, music, etc... 'entertainment' industry. And HN, it isn't just a few odd balls on HN championing it. I wish there was way to get a sentiment analysis of HN, it seems there are lot more people using it than not using it. And, what about the silent majority, the programmers that don't hang out on HN? I hear colleagues talk about it all the time. The impact is here, whether they are self directed or not, or whether there are still a few people not using it.
- sebastiansm 2y ago
  Yesterday ChatGPT helped me to elaborate a skincare routine for my wife with multiple serums and creams that she received for Christmas. She and I had no idea when to apply, how to combine or when to avoid combination of some of those products. I could have google it myself in the evenings and had the answer in a few days of research, but with o1 in a 15min session my wife had had a solid weekly routine, the reasoning about those choices and academic papers with research about those products. (Obviously she knows a lot about skincare in general, so she had the capacity to recognize any wrong recommendation). Nothing game changer, but is great to save lots of time in this kind of tasks.
  - exe34 2y ago
    Mention bleach and motor oil and see if it manages to exclude those!
    - diego_sandoval 2y ago
      If you think it won't exclude them 100% of the time, then you haven't used o1.
  - irunmyownemail 2y ago
    It's 2 days after Christmas, too early to know the impact of the purchases made based on what AI recommended, either positive or negative. If you're relying on AI to replace a human doctor trained in skin care or alternatively, your Google skills; please consider consulting an actual doctor. If she "knows a lot about skincare in general, so she had the capacity to recognize any wrong recommendation", then what did AI actually accomplish in the end.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
      >> It's 2 days after Christmas, too early to know the impact of the purchases made based on what AI recommended, either positive or negative. No worries, I can tell you what to expect: nothing. No effect. Zilch. Nada. Zero. Those beauty creams are just a total scam and that's obvious from the fact they're targetted just as well to women who don't need them (young, good skin) as to ones who do (older, bad skin). About the only thing the beauty industry has figured out really works in the last five or six decades is Tretinoin, but you can use that on its own. Yet it's sold as one component in creams with a dozen others, that do nothing. Except make you spend money.
- drooby 2y ago
  > convoluted expensive google search Interesting, I'm the opposite now. Why would I click a couple links to read a couple (verbose) blog posts when I can read a succinct LLM response. If I have low confidence in the quality of the response then I supplement with Google search. I feel near certain that I am saving time with this method. And the output is much more tuned to the context and framing of my question. Hah, take for example my last query in ChatGPT: > Are there any ancient technologies that when discovered furthered modern understanding of its field? ChatGPT gave some great responses, super fast. Google also provides some great results (though some miss the mark), but I would need to parse at least three different articles and condense the results. To be fair, ChatGPT gives some bad responses too.. But both an LLM and Google search should be used in conjunction to perform a search at the same time. Use LLMs as breadth-first search, and Google as depth-first search.
- paulcole 2y ago
  > Every time I hear someone championing AI, it is a coder The argument I make is why aren’t more people finding ways to code with AI? I work in a leadership role at a marketing agency and am a passable coder for scripts using Python and/or Google Apps Scripts. In the past year, I’ve built more useful and valuable tools with the help of AI than I had in the 3 or so years before. We’re automating more boring stuff than ever before. It boggles my mind that everybody isn’t doing this. In the past, I was limited by technical ability because my knowledge of our business and processes was very high. Now I’m finding that technical ability isn’t my limitation, it’s how well I can explain our processes to AI.
- mbesto 2y ago
  Not a coder here (although I can code). I use LLMs 15+ time a day.
- tiahura 2y ago
  I’m a lawyer and AI has become deeply integrated into my work.
  - deleted 2y ago
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- AnotherGoodName 2y ago
  I'd argue that's just because coders are first to line up for this. There was a different thread on this site i read where a journalist used the wrong units of measurement (kilowatts instead of killowatt-hours for energy storage). You could paste the entire article into chatGPT with a prompt "spot mistakes in the following; [text]" and get an appropriate correction for this and similar mistakes the author made. As in there's journalists right now posting articles with clear mistakes that could have been proof read more accurately than they were if they were willing to use AI. The only excuse i could think of is resistance to change. A lot of professions right now could do their job better if they leant on the current generation of AI.
- oytis 2y ago
  In my bubble coders find LLMs least useful. After all we already have all kinds of fancy autocomplete that works deterministically and doesn't hallucinate - and still not everyone uses it. When I use LLMs, I use it exactly as Google search on steroids. It's great for providing a summary on some unknown topic. It doesn't matter if it gets it wrong - the main value is in keywords and project names, and one can use the real Google search from there. And it isn't expensive if you are using the free version
- deleted 2y ago
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giraffe_lady 2y ago
These are different social contingents I think. At least for me I was super on board with wikipedia because as you say the use to me was immediate and certain. AI I have tried every few months for the last two years but I still haven't found a strong use for it. It has changed nothing for me personally except making some products I use worse.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  Have you paid for it?
  - giraffe_lady 2y ago
    Yes my work pays for several of them. I don't particularly enjoy coding so believe me I have sincerely tried to get this to work.
    - timcobb 2y ago
      Cursor has been quite the jaw-dropping game changer for me for greenfield hobby dev. I don't know how useful it would be for my job, where I do maintenance on a pretty big app, and develop features on this pretty big app. But it could be great, I just don't know because work only allows Copilot. And Copilot is somewhere between annoying and novelty in my opinion.
- Loughla 2y ago
  AI is only useful for me if I have a good idea of what the answer might already be, or at least what it absolutely can't be. It helps me get to an answer a little bit quicker, but it doesn't perform any absolutely groundbreaking work for me.
xvector 2y ago
The Wikipedia analogy strikes true. Generally people are resistant to change and the average person will typically insist new technologies are pointless. Electricity and the airplane were supposed to be useless and dangerous dead ends according to the common person: https://pessimistsarchive.org/ https://pessimistsarchive.org/ But we all like to think we have super unique opinions and personalities, so "this time it's different." When the change finally happens, people go about their lives as if they were right all along and the new technology is simply a mysterious and immutable fixture of reality that was always there.
- toddmorey 2y ago
  I don’t think that was the common person, nor do I think the common person today thinks AI will be useless.
- wat10000 2y ago
  People also thought the Segway was a useless dead end and they were right.
  - oldpersonintx 2y ago
    [dead]
  - timcobb 2y ago
    Segway seems to have hardly been a dead end, or useless for that matter. Segway-style devices like the electric unicycle and many other light mobility devices seem to be direct descendants of the Segway. Segway introduced gyroscopes to the popular tech imagination, at least in my lifetime (not sure before).
    - wat10000 2y ago
      What other light mobility devices? E-bikes and scooters seem to be the big things and they’re not anything like a Segway descendant. A world where Segway never happened would be nearly indistinguishable from our own.
kruxigt 2y ago
[dead]
i_love_retros 2y ago
> It's enabled two specific applications I’ve built which wouldn’t be possible at single-person scale. I'd love to hear more about how you utilised AI for this. Personally I'm struggling to find it more useful than a slightly fancy code completion tool
- broast 2y ago
  > slightly fancy code completion tool Does this alone not increase your productivity exponentially? It does mine. I personally read code faster than I write it so it is an undeniable boon.
  - i_love_retros 2y ago
    I've found it depends on the context (pardon the pun) For example, personal projects that are small and where copilot has access to all the context it needs to make a suggestion - such as a script or small game - it has been really useful. But in a real world large project for my day job, where it would need access to almost the entire code base to make any kind of useful suggestion that could help me build a feature, it's useless! And I'd argue this is when I need it.
    - wenc 2y ago
      At present, LLMs work well with smaller chunks of code at time. Check out these tips for using Aider (a CLI based LLM code assisntant) https://aider.chat/docs/usage/tips.html https://aider.chat/docs/usage/tips.html It can ingest the entire codebase (up to its context length), but for some reason, I’ve always had much higher quality chats with smaller bite-sized pieces of code.
  - jprete 2y ago
    Autocomplete distracts me enough that it really needs to be close to 100% correct before it's useful. Otherwise it's just wrecking my flow and slowing me down.
  - coffeebeqn 2y ago
    Exponentially? Absolutely not. In the best case it creates something that’s almost useful. Are you working on large actual codebases or talking about some one off toy apps?
hbn 2y ago
Anyone who says AI is useless never had to do the old method of cobbling together git and ffmpeg commands from StackOverflow answers. I have no interest in learning the horrible unintuitive UX of every CLI I interact with, I'd much rather just describe in English what I want and have the computer figure it out for me. It has practically never failed me, and if it does I'll know right away and I can fall back to the old method of doing it manually. For now it's saving me so much time with menial, time-wasting day-to-day tasks.
- jghn 2y ago
  I had a debate recently with a colleague who is very skeptical of LLMs for every day work. Why not lean in on searching Google and cross referencing answers, like we've done for ages? And that's fine. But my counterargument is that what I find to be so powerful about the LLMs is the ability to refine my question, narrow in on a tangent and then pull back out, etc. And *then* I can take its final outcome and cross reference it. With the old way of doing things, I often felt like I was stumbling in the dark trying to find the right search string. Instead I can use the LLM to do the heavy lifting for me in that regard.
- ADeerAppeared 2y ago
  > Anyone who says AI is useless Most of those people are a bit bad at making their case. What they mean but don't convey well is that AI is useless for it's proclaimed uses. You are correct that LLMs are pretty good at guessing this kind of well-documented & easily verifiable but hard to find information. That is a valid use. (Though, woe betide the fool who uses LLMs for irreversible destructive actions.) The thing is though, this isn't enough. There just aren't that many questions out there that match those criteria. Generative AI is too expensive to serve that small a task. Charging a buck a question won't earn the $100 billion OpenAI needs to balance the books. Your use case gets dismissed because on it's own, it doesn't sustain AI.
  - wenc 2y ago
    I think you’re on to something. I find the sentiment around LLMs (which is at the early adoption stage) to be unnecessarily hostile. (beyond normal HN skepticism) But it can be simultaneously true that LLMs add a lot of value to some tasks and less to others —- and less to some people. It’s a bit tautological, but in order to benefit from LLMs, you have to be in a context where you stand to most benefit from LLMs. These are people who need to generate ideas, are expert enough to spot consequential mistakes, know when to use LLMs and when not to. They have to be in a domain where the occasional mistake generated costs less than the new ideas generated, so they still come out ahead. It’s a bit paradoxical. LLMs are good for: (1) bite-sized chunks of code; (2) ideating; (3) writing once-off code in tedious syntax that I don’t really care to learn (like making complex plots in seaborn or matplotllib); (4) adding docstrings and documentation to code; (5) figuring out console error messages, with suggestions as to causes (I’ve debugged a ton of errors this way — and have arrived at the answer faster than wading through Stackoverflow); (6) figuring out what algorithm to use in a particular situation; etc. They’re not yet good at: (1) understanding complex codebases in their entirety (this is one of the overpromises; even Aider Chat’s docs tell you not to ingest the whole codebase); (2) any kind of fully automated task that needs to be 100% deterministic and correct (they’re assistants); (3) getting math reasoning 100% correct (but they can still open up new avenues for exploration that you’ve never even thought about); It takes practice to know what LLMs are good at and what they’re not. If the initial stance is negativity rather than a growth mindset, then that practice never comes. But it’s ok. The rest of us will keep on using LLMs and move on.
wruza 2y ago
We can't test/review these apps though, can we? I'm asking not for snark, but because when AI gives me something not _quite_ working, it requires much more time than what a "every 6 minutes in 10 hour work day" frame would allow to investigate. I just wonder if maybe you're pasting it as is and don't care about correctness if the happy path sort of works. Speaking of subsets, coders who did that before AI were also quite a group. There must be something that explains the difference in our experiences. Apologies for the fact that my only idea is kinda negative. I understand the potential hyperbola here, but it doesn't explain much. I can stand AI BS once a day, maybe twice, before uncontrollably cursing into the chat.
- thomashop 2y ago
  Why not write tests with AI, too? Since using LLMs as coding assistants, my codebases have much more thorough documentation, testing and code coverage. Don't start when you're already in a buggy dead-end. Test-driven development with LLMs should be done right from the start. Also keep the code modular so it is easy to include the correct context. Fine-grained git commits. Feature-branches. All the tools that help teams of humans of varying levels of expertise work together.
  - croes 2y ago
    Becaus then you need tests for the tests
    - thomashop 2y ago
      Sure. You can always write more tests. That's not a problem specific to AI. I'd also do code reviews on the code AI produces.
- mistercheph 2y ago
  You may have enough expertise in your field that when you have a question, you know where to start looking. Juniors and students encounter dozens of problems and question per hour that fall into the unknown unknown category
stronglikedan 2y ago
Have you tried a few? If so, which do you prefer? If not, which do you use? I'm a little late to the party, and the current amount of choices is quite intimidating.
- airstrike 2y ago
  I imagine you're asking about coding help. For that, I think you should qualify any answer you get with the user's most commonly used language (and framework, if applicable). In my experience, Claude Sonnet 3.5 (3.6?) has been unbeatable. I use it for Rust. Making sense of compiler errors, rubberducking, finding more efficient ways to write some function and, truth be told, some times just plain old debugging. More than once, I've been able to dump a massive module onto the chat context and say "look, I'm experiencing this weird behavior but it's really hard to pin down what's causing it in this code" and it pointed to the exact issue in a second. That alone is worth the price of admission. Way better than ChatGPT 4o and o-1, in my experience, despite me saying the exact opposite a few months ago.
- esafak 2y ago
  Try Cody. It integrates with your IDE, understands your code base, and lets you pick the LLM.
croes 2y ago
Are you still a coder when you use AI 100 times a day? AI is a type of outsourcing, you became a customer.
- yyyyz 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - utopicwork 2y ago
    Ask your ai search engine of choice what the Dunning–Kruger effect is
    - raincole 2y ago
      Well actually (nerdy_guy_emoji) (finger_pointing) Dunning-Kruger effect isn't what you think it is.
  - croes 2y ago
    How would the a 12 year old with ChatGPT recognize complicateed errors? You still need experience to check the code not only the result otherwise you get this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42235630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42235630
  - smithcoin 2y ago
    > Coding as a profession is completely obsolete. Citation needed.
    - croes 2y ago
      Maybe this one https://decrypt.co/246216/ai-could-make-coders-obsolete-in-two-years-aws-chief-predicts https://decrypt.co/246216/ai-could-make-coders-obsolete-in-t...
  - hyhconito 2y ago
    You sound like the guy I just had to fire after blowing his toes off several times. If you think you are obsolete or faster than anyone else with these tools then you only naive enough to have lost your objectivity to the marketing. I deal with real risk and failures from the output of ChatGPT which have serious financial consequences. The first victim is always the developer, then the tester. At best, it is very good at ousting people who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a damn computer.
monkeynotes 2y ago
This isn't about if LLMs are useful, it's about how useful can they become. We are trying to understand if there is a path forward to transformative tech, or are we just limited to a very useful tool. It's a valid conversation after ~3 years of anticipating the world to be disrupted by this tech. So far it has not delivered. Wikipedia did not change the world either, it's just a great tool that I use all the time As for software, it performs ok. I give up on it most of the time if I am trying to write a whole application. You have to acquire a new skill, prompt engineering, and feverish iteration. It's a frustrating game of whack-a-mole and I find it quicker to write the code myself and just have the LLM help me with architecture ideas, bug bashing, and it's also quite good at writing tests. I'd rather know the code intimately so I can more quickly debug it than have an LLM write it and just trust it did it well.
- wenc 2y ago
  By the way, Wikipedia did change the world. Some of the most important inventions are the ones we don’t notice.
nemo44x 2y ago
Peter Thiel talked about this years ago in his book From 0 to One. His key insight, which we're seeing today, is that AI tools will work side-by-side with people and enhance their productivity to levels never imagined. From helping with some basic tasks ("write an Excel script that transforms this table from this format to this new format") to helping write programs, it's a tool that aids humans in getting more things done than previously possible.
deleted 2y ago
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wodderam 2y ago
To me this is besides the point. LLMs obviously have use cases but the market has practically priced in "AGI". The danger is not that LLMs take jobs. The danger is that we are in a massive bubble and while these are nice tools they are not worth anything close to the trillions of dollars bet on them. IMO the psychology at work here is basically denial that we can both be in the biggest bubble of all time in terms of dollars and LLMs are useful. Just not THAT useful.
- dabauws 2y ago
  Why should we care about whether we're in a market bubble or not, especially if one does not have their own money staked in the bubble? It's somebody else's capital that's at risk, no? If they're wrong, let them reap the consequences. (cue rebuttal based on systemic consequences / financial bailouts etc, but you know what I mean; also, the dotcom bubble deflation didn't require a bailout)

Mistletoe 2y ago

But please accept that you are in a small subset of people that it is very useful to. Every time I hear someone championing AI, it is a coder. AI is basically useless to me, it is just a convoluted expensive google search.

tossandthrow 2y ago
I use ai to care for my plants, to give me recipes for pan pancakes, to help me fix my coffee machine. LLMs as a popularized thing is just about 2 years old. It is still mainly early adopters. For smartphones it might have taken 10 to 15 years to gain widespread traction. I think it is safe to say that we are only scratching the surface.
- giraffe_lady 2y ago
  These are not categories that needed this change or benefit from it. Specific plant care is one of the easiest things to find information about. And are you serious you couldn't find a pancake recipe? The coffee machine idk it depends on what you did. But the other two are like a parody of AI use cases. "We made it slightly more convenient, but it might be wrong now and also burns down a tree every time you use it."
  - qup 2y ago
    > "We made it slightly more convenient, but it might be wrong now and also burns down a tree every time you use it." Sounds like early criticisms of the internet. I assume you mean he should be doing those things with a search engine, but maybe we shouldn't allow that either. Force him to use a book! It may be slightly less convenient, and could still be wrong, but...
    - tossandthrow 2y ago
      I ought to ask my dead grandma to save a kg of co2.
    - giraffe_lady 2y ago
      Before crypto and AI computing in general and the internet in particular were always an incredible deal in terms of how much societal value we get out of it for the electricity consumed.
- Loughla 2y ago
  >It is still mainly early adopters. I just disagree with this. Every b2b or saas is marketing itself as using hallucination free AI. We're waaaaayyyyyy past the early adoption stage, and the product hasn't meaningfully improved.
- coffeebeqn 2y ago
  I also use it for plant care tips. What should I feed this plant and what kind of soil to use and all the questions I never bothered to Google and crawl through some long blog article on
davidmurdoch 2y ago
Do you not use it to try learning new things? I use it to help get familiar with new software (recently for FreeCAD), or new concepts (passive speaker crossover design).
josh2600 2y ago
Wow, this is a wild opinion. I wonder how many people you’ve talked to about this? I know tons of people in my social groups that love AI and use it every day in it’s current form.
herval 2y ago
it's _extremely_ useful for lawyers, arguably even more so than for coders, given how much faster they can do stuff. They're also extremely useful for anyone who writes text and wants a reviewer. Also capable to execute most daily activities of some roles, such as TPMs. It's still useful to a small subset of all those professions - the early adopters. Same way computers were useful to many professionals before the UI (but only a small fraction of them had the skillset to use terminals)
- singleshot_ 2y ago
  > it's _extremely_ useful for lawyers, How so? How are you using LLMs to practice law? Genuinely curious.
  - herval 2y ago
    multiple lawyer friends I know are using chatgpt (and custom gptees) for contract reviews. They upload some guidelines as knowledge, then upload any new contract for validation. Allegedly replaces hours of reading. This is a large portion of the work, in some cases. Some of them also use it to debate a contract, to see if there's anything they overlooked or to find loopholes. LLMs are extremely good at that kind of constrained creativity mode where they _have_ to produce something (they suck at saying "I dont know" or "no"), so I guess it works as sort of a "second brain" of sorts, for those too. There's even reported cases of entire legislations being written with LLMs already [1]. I'm sure there's thousands more we haven't heard about - the same way researchers are writing papers w/ LLMs w/o disclosing it [1] https://olhardigital.com.br/2023/12/05/pro/lei-escrita-pelo-chatgpt-no-rs-gera-repercussao-internacional-qual-e-o-limite/ https://olhardigital.com.br/2023/12/05/pro/lei-escrita-pelo-...
    - rsynnott 2y ago
      Five years later, when the contract turns out to be defective, I doubt the clients are going to be _thrilled_ with “well, no, I didn’t read it, but I did feed it to a magic robot”. Like, this is malpractice, surely?
y1n0 2y ago
My wife uses it almost as much as me which isn’t quite daily. She is not a coder whatsoever. I’ll ask her what her use cases are and reply here later if I don’t forget.
- y1n0 2y ago
  She uses gpt as an editor for her emails and web content. she’ll just say "improve this," she gets options for how she might say something in a different way. When preparing for a summit, she gave it a list of broad topics she wanted to cover. Gpt generated a list of specific titles and descriptions for her talks. This in turn gave her specific ideas to write talks about instead of just the broad topic. When she wasn’t sure about the sequence of her talks, she asked GPT for advice on the order. GPT suggested an arrangement that created a logical flow and the reasoning for that flow, which ended up being pretty good. She often uses gpt as a sounding board for ideas. She said she likes having an always-available colleague to bounce thoughts off of.
School-Cotton 2y ago
Walk into any random coffee shop in America where people are working on their laptops and you will see some subset of them on ChatGPT. It’s definitely not just coders who are finding it useful.
Ukv 2y ago
Particularly given the article's target is "systems based on large neural networks" and not specifically LLMs, I'd claim there are a vast number of uncontroversially beneficial applications: language translation, video transcription, material/product defect detection, weather forecasting/early warning systems, OCR, spam filtering, protein folding, tumor segmentation, drug discovery and interaction prediction, etc.
stickfigure 2y ago
> convoluted expensive google search I'd call it a working google search, unlike, you know, google these days. Actually google's LLM-based search results have been getting better, so maybe this isn't the end of the line for them. But for sophisticated questions (on noncoding topics!) I still always go to chatgpt or claude.
- coliveira 2y ago
  > google's LLM-based search results have been getting better don't worry, Google WILL change this because they don't make money when people find the answer right away. They want people to see multiple ads before leaving the site.
FrustratedMonky 2y ago
It's being used in drive through windows. In movies, in graphic design, pod casts, music, etc... 'entertainment' industry. And HN, it isn't just a few odd balls on HN championing it. I wish there was way to get a sentiment analysis of HN, it seems there are lot more people using it than not using it. And, what about the silent majority, the programmers that don't hang out on HN? I hear colleagues talk about it all the time. The impact is here, whether they are self directed or not, or whether there are still a few people not using it.
sebastiansm 2y ago
Yesterday ChatGPT helped me to elaborate a skincare routine for my wife with multiple serums and creams that she received for Christmas. She and I had no idea when to apply, how to combine or when to avoid combination of some of those products. I could have google it myself in the evenings and had the answer in a few days of research, but with o1 in a 15min session my wife had had a solid weekly routine, the reasoning about those choices and academic papers with research about those products. (Obviously she knows a lot about skincare in general, so she had the capacity to recognize any wrong recommendation). Nothing game changer, but is great to save lots of time in this kind of tasks.
- exe34 2y ago
  Mention bleach and motor oil and see if it manages to exclude those!
  - diego_sandoval 2y ago
    If you think it won't exclude them 100% of the time, then you haven't used o1.
- irunmyownemail 2y ago
  It's 2 days after Christmas, too early to know the impact of the purchases made based on what AI recommended, either positive or negative. If you're relying on AI to replace a human doctor trained in skin care or alternatively, your Google skills; please consider consulting an actual doctor. If she "knows a lot about skincare in general, so she had the capacity to recognize any wrong recommendation", then what did AI actually accomplish in the end.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
    >> It's 2 days after Christmas, too early to know the impact of the purchases made based on what AI recommended, either positive or negative. No worries, I can tell you what to expect: nothing. No effect. Zilch. Nada. Zero. Those beauty creams are just a total scam and that's obvious from the fact they're targetted just as well to women who don't need them (young, good skin) as to ones who do (older, bad skin). About the only thing the beauty industry has figured out really works in the last five or six decades is Tretinoin, but you can use that on its own. Yet it's sold as one component in creams with a dozen others, that do nothing. Except make you spend money.
drooby 2y ago
> convoluted expensive google search Interesting, I'm the opposite now. Why would I click a couple links to read a couple (verbose) blog posts when I can read a succinct LLM response. If I have low confidence in the quality of the response then I supplement with Google search. I feel near certain that I am saving time with this method. And the output is much more tuned to the context and framing of my question. Hah, take for example my last query in ChatGPT: > Are there any ancient technologies that when discovered furthered modern understanding of its field? ChatGPT gave some great responses, super fast. Google also provides some great results (though some miss the mark), but I would need to parse at least three different articles and condense the results. To be fair, ChatGPT gives some bad responses too.. But both an LLM and Google search should be used in conjunction to perform a search at the same time. Use LLMs as breadth-first search, and Google as depth-first search.
paulcole 2y ago
> Every time I hear someone championing AI, it is a coder The argument I make is why aren’t more people finding ways to code with AI? I work in a leadership role at a marketing agency and am a passable coder for scripts using Python and/or Google Apps Scripts. In the past year, I’ve built more useful and valuable tools with the help of AI than I had in the 3 or so years before. We’re automating more boring stuff than ever before. It boggles my mind that everybody isn’t doing this. In the past, I was limited by technical ability because my knowledge of our business and processes was very high. Now I’m finding that technical ability isn’t my limitation, it’s how well I can explain our processes to AI.
mbesto 2y ago
Not a coder here (although I can code). I use LLMs 15+ time a day.
tiahura 2y ago
I’m a lawyer and AI has become deeply integrated into my work.
- deleted 2y ago
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AnotherGoodName 2y ago
I'd argue that's just because coders are first to line up for this. There was a different thread on this site i read where a journalist used the wrong units of measurement (kilowatts instead of killowatt-hours for energy storage). You could paste the entire article into chatGPT with a prompt "spot mistakes in the following; [text]" and get an appropriate correction for this and similar mistakes the author made. As in there's journalists right now posting articles with clear mistakes that could have been proof read more accurately than they were if they were willing to use AI. The only excuse i could think of is resistance to change. A lot of professions right now could do their job better if they leant on the current generation of AI.
oytis 2y ago
In my bubble coders find LLMs least useful. After all we already have all kinds of fancy autocomplete that works deterministically and doesn't hallucinate - and still not everyone uses it. When I use LLMs, I use it exactly as Google search on steroids. It's great for providing a summary on some unknown topic. It doesn't matter if it gets it wrong - the main value is in keywords and project names, and one can use the real Google search from there. And it isn't expensive if you are using the free version
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giraffe_lady 2y ago

These are different social contingents I think. At least for me I was super on board with wikipedia because as you say the use to me was immediate and certain. AI I have tried every few months for the last two years but I still haven't found a strong use for it. It has changed nothing for me personally except making some products I use worse.

llm_trw 2y ago
Have you paid for it?
- giraffe_lady 2y ago
  Yes my work pays for several of them. I don't particularly enjoy coding so believe me I have sincerely tried to get this to work.
  - timcobb 2y ago
    Cursor has been quite the jaw-dropping game changer for me for greenfield hobby dev. I don't know how useful it would be for my job, where I do maintenance on a pretty big app, and develop features on this pretty big app. But it could be great, I just don't know because work only allows Copilot. And Copilot is somewhere between annoying and novelty in my opinion.
Loughla 2y ago
AI is only useful for me if I have a good idea of what the answer might already be, or at least what it absolutely can't be. It helps me get to an answer a little bit quicker, but it doesn't perform any absolutely groundbreaking work for me.

xvector 2y ago

The Wikipedia analogy strikes true. Generally people are resistant to change and the average person will typically insist new technologies are pointless. Electricity and the airplane were supposed to be useless and dangerous dead ends according to the common person: https://pessimistsarchive.org/ https://pessimistsarchive.org/ But we all like to think we have super unique opinions and personalities, so "this time it's different." When the change finally happens, people go about their lives as if they were right all along and the new technology is simply a mysterious and immutable fixture of reality that was always there.

toddmorey 2y ago
I don’t think that was the common person, nor do I think the common person today thinks AI will be useless.
wat10000 2y ago
People also thought the Segway was a useless dead end and they were right.
- oldpersonintx 2y ago
  [dead]
- timcobb 2y ago
  Segway seems to have hardly been a dead end, or useless for that matter. Segway-style devices like the electric unicycle and many other light mobility devices seem to be direct descendants of the Segway. Segway introduced gyroscopes to the popular tech imagination, at least in my lifetime (not sure before).
  - wat10000 2y ago
    What other light mobility devices? E-bikes and scooters seem to be the big things and they’re not anything like a Segway descendant. A world where Segway never happened would be nearly indistinguishable from our own.

kruxigt 2y ago

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i_love_retros 2y ago

> It's enabled two specific applications I’ve built which wouldn’t be possible at single-person scale. I'd love to hear more about how you utilised AI for this. Personally I'm struggling to find it more useful than a slightly fancy code completion tool

broast 2y ago
> slightly fancy code completion tool Does this alone not increase your productivity exponentially? It does mine. I personally read code faster than I write it so it is an undeniable boon.
- i_love_retros 2y ago
  I've found it depends on the context (pardon the pun) For example, personal projects that are small and where copilot has access to all the context it needs to make a suggestion - such as a script or small game - it has been really useful. But in a real world large project for my day job, where it would need access to almost the entire code base to make any kind of useful suggestion that could help me build a feature, it's useless! And I'd argue this is when I need it.
  - wenc 2y ago
    At present, LLMs work well with smaller chunks of code at time. Check out these tips for using Aider (a CLI based LLM code assisntant) https://aider.chat/docs/usage/tips.html https://aider.chat/docs/usage/tips.html It can ingest the entire codebase (up to its context length), but for some reason, I’ve always had much higher quality chats with smaller bite-sized pieces of code.
- jprete 2y ago
  Autocomplete distracts me enough that it really needs to be close to 100% correct before it's useful. Otherwise it's just wrecking my flow and slowing me down.
- coffeebeqn 2y ago
  Exponentially? Absolutely not. In the best case it creates something that’s almost useful. Are you working on large actual codebases or talking about some one off toy apps?

hbn 2y ago

Anyone who says AI is useless never had to do the old method of cobbling together git and ffmpeg commands from StackOverflow answers. I have no interest in learning the horrible unintuitive UX of every CLI I interact with, I'd much rather just describe in English what I want and have the computer figure it out for me. It has practically never failed me, and if it does I'll know right away and I can fall back to the old method of doing it manually. For now it's saving me so much time with menial, time-wasting day-to-day tasks.

jghn 2y ago
I had a debate recently with a colleague who is very skeptical of LLMs for every day work. Why not lean in on searching Google and cross referencing answers, like we've done for ages? And that's fine. But my counterargument is that what I find to be so powerful about the LLMs is the ability to refine my question, narrow in on a tangent and then pull back out, etc. And *then* I can take its final outcome and cross reference it. With the old way of doing things, I often felt like I was stumbling in the dark trying to find the right search string. Instead I can use the LLM to do the heavy lifting for me in that regard.
ADeerAppeared 2y ago
> Anyone who says AI is useless Most of those people are a bit bad at making their case. What they mean but don't convey well is that AI is useless for it's proclaimed uses. You are correct that LLMs are pretty good at guessing this kind of well-documented & easily verifiable but hard to find information. That is a valid use. (Though, woe betide the fool who uses LLMs for irreversible destructive actions.) The thing is though, this isn't enough. There just aren't that many questions out there that match those criteria. Generative AI is too expensive to serve that small a task. Charging a buck a question won't earn the $100 billion OpenAI needs to balance the books. Your use case gets dismissed because on it's own, it doesn't sustain AI.
- wenc 2y ago
  I think you’re on to something. I find the sentiment around LLMs (which is at the early adoption stage) to be unnecessarily hostile. (beyond normal HN skepticism) But it can be simultaneously true that LLMs add a lot of value to some tasks and less to others —- and less to some people. It’s a bit tautological, but in order to benefit from LLMs, you have to be in a context where you stand to most benefit from LLMs. These are people who need to generate ideas, are expert enough to spot consequential mistakes, know when to use LLMs and when not to. They have to be in a domain where the occasional mistake generated costs less than the new ideas generated, so they still come out ahead. It’s a bit paradoxical. LLMs are good for: (1) bite-sized chunks of code; (2) ideating; (3) writing once-off code in tedious syntax that I don’t really care to learn (like making complex plots in seaborn or matplotllib); (4) adding docstrings and documentation to code; (5) figuring out console error messages, with suggestions as to causes (I’ve debugged a ton of errors this way — and have arrived at the answer faster than wading through Stackoverflow); (6) figuring out what algorithm to use in a particular situation; etc. They’re not yet good at: (1) understanding complex codebases in their entirety (this is one of the overpromises; even Aider Chat’s docs tell you not to ingest the whole codebase); (2) any kind of fully automated task that needs to be 100% deterministic and correct (they’re assistants); (3) getting math reasoning 100% correct (but they can still open up new avenues for exploration that you’ve never even thought about); It takes practice to know what LLMs are good at and what they’re not. If the initial stance is negativity rather than a growth mindset, then that practice never comes. But it’s ok. The rest of us will keep on using LLMs and move on.

wruza 2y ago

We can't test/review these apps though, can we? I'm asking not for snark, but because when AI gives me something not _quite_ working, it requires much more time than what a "every 6 minutes in 10 hour work day" frame would allow to investigate. I just wonder if maybe you're pasting it as is and don't care about correctness if the happy path sort of works. Speaking of subsets, coders who did that before AI were also quite a group. There must be something that explains the difference in our experiences. Apologies for the fact that my only idea is kinda negative. I understand the potential hyperbola here, but it doesn't explain much. I can stand AI BS once a day, maybe twice, before uncontrollably cursing into the chat.

thomashop 2y ago
Why not write tests with AI, too? Since using LLMs as coding assistants, my codebases have much more thorough documentation, testing and code coverage. Don't start when you're already in a buggy dead-end. Test-driven development with LLMs should be done right from the start. Also keep the code modular so it is easy to include the correct context. Fine-grained git commits. Feature-branches. All the tools that help teams of humans of varying levels of expertise work together.
- croes 2y ago
  Becaus then you need tests for the tests
  - thomashop 2y ago
    Sure. You can always write more tests. That's not a problem specific to AI. I'd also do code reviews on the code AI produces.
mistercheph 2y ago
You may have enough expertise in your field that when you have a question, you know where to start looking. Juniors and students encounter dozens of problems and question per hour that fall into the unknown unknown category

stronglikedan 2y ago

Have you tried a few? If so, which do you prefer? If not, which do you use? I'm a little late to the party, and the current amount of choices is quite intimidating.

airstrike 2y ago
I imagine you're asking about coding help. For that, I think you should qualify any answer you get with the user's most commonly used language (and framework, if applicable). In my experience, Claude Sonnet 3.5 (3.6?) has been unbeatable. I use it for Rust. Making sense of compiler errors, rubberducking, finding more efficient ways to write some function and, truth be told, some times just plain old debugging. More than once, I've been able to dump a massive module onto the chat context and say "look, I'm experiencing this weird behavior but it's really hard to pin down what's causing it in this code" and it pointed to the exact issue in a second. That alone is worth the price of admission. Way better than ChatGPT 4o and o-1, in my experience, despite me saying the exact opposite a few months ago.
esafak 2y ago
Try Cody. It integrates with your IDE, understands your code base, and lets you pick the LLM.

croes 2y ago

Are you still a coder when you use AI 100 times a day? AI is a type of outsourcing, you became a customer.

yyyyz 2y ago
[flagged]
- utopicwork 2y ago
  Ask your ai search engine of choice what the Dunning–Kruger effect is
  - raincole 2y ago
    Well actually (nerdy_guy_emoji) (finger_pointing) Dunning-Kruger effect isn't what you think it is.
- croes 2y ago
  How would the a 12 year old with ChatGPT recognize complicateed errors? You still need experience to check the code not only the result otherwise you get this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42235630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42235630
- smithcoin 2y ago
  > Coding as a profession is completely obsolete. Citation needed.
  - croes 2y ago
    Maybe this one https://decrypt.co/246216/ai-could-make-coders-obsolete-in-two-years-aws-chief-predicts https://decrypt.co/246216/ai-could-make-coders-obsolete-in-t...
- hyhconito 2y ago
  You sound like the guy I just had to fire after blowing his toes off several times. If you think you are obsolete or faster than anyone else with these tools then you only naive enough to have lost your objectivity to the marketing. I deal with real risk and failures from the output of ChatGPT which have serious financial consequences. The first victim is always the developer, then the tester. At best, it is very good at ousting people who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a damn computer.

monkeynotes 2y ago

This isn't about if LLMs are useful, it's about how useful can they become. We are trying to understand if there is a path forward to transformative tech, or are we just limited to a very useful tool. It's a valid conversation after ~3 years of anticipating the world to be disrupted by this tech. So far it has not delivered. Wikipedia did not change the world either, it's just a great tool that I use all the time As for software, it performs ok. I give up on it most of the time if I am trying to write a whole application. You have to acquire a new skill, prompt engineering, and feverish iteration. It's a frustrating game of whack-a-mole and I find it quicker to write the code myself and just have the LLM help me with architecture ideas, bug bashing, and it's also quite good at writing tests. I'd rather know the code intimately so I can more quickly debug it than have an LLM write it and just trust it did it well.

wenc 2y ago
By the way, Wikipedia did change the world. Some of the most important inventions are the ones we don’t notice.

nemo44x 2y ago

Peter Thiel talked about this years ago in his book From 0 to One. His key insight, which we're seeing today, is that AI tools will work side-by-side with people and enhance their productivity to levels never imagined. From helping with some basic tasks ("write an Excel script that transforms this table from this format to this new format") to helping write programs, it's a tool that aids humans in getting more things done than previously possible.

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wodderam 2y ago

To me this is besides the point. LLMs obviously have use cases but the market has practically priced in "AGI". The danger is not that LLMs take jobs. The danger is that we are in a massive bubble and while these are nice tools they are not worth anything close to the trillions of dollars bet on them. IMO the psychology at work here is basically denial that we can both be in the biggest bubble of all time in terms of dollars and LLMs are useful. Just not THAT useful.

dabauws 2y ago
Why should we care about whether we're in a market bubble or not, especially if one does not have their own money staked in the bubble? It's somebody else's capital that's at risk, no? If they're wrong, let them reap the consequences. (cue rebuttal based on systemic consequences / financial bailouts etc, but you know what I mean; also, the dotcom bubble deflation didn't require a bailout)