7 ms·

Objectively. I’m now tackling tasks I wouldn’t have even considered two or three years ago, but the biggest breakthrough has been overcoming procrastination. Wh

Objectively. I’m now tackling tasks I wouldn’t have even considered two or three years ago, but the biggest breakthrough has been overcoming procrastination. When AI handles over 50% of the work, there’s a 90% chance I’ll finish the entire task faster than it would normally take me just to get started on something new.

svachalek 1y ago
I don't think it's helped me do anything I couldn't do, in fact I've learned it's far easier to do hard things myself than trying to prompt an AI out of the ditches it will dig trying to do it. But I also find it's great for getting painful and annoying tasks out of the way that I really can't motivate to do myself.
- wiml 1y ago
  I think there might be cases, for some people or some tasks, where the difficulty of filling in a blank page is greater than the difficulty of fixing an entire page of errors. Even if you have to do all the same mental work, it feels like a different category of work.
- cheema33 1y ago
  > I don't think it's helped me do anything I couldn't do I am seeing a pattern here. It appears that AI isn't for everyone. Not everyone's personality may be a good fit for using AI. Just like not everybody is a good candidate for being a software dev, or police officer etc. I used to think that it is a tool. Like a car is. Everybody would want one. But that appears not be the case. For me, I used AI every day as a tool, for work and and home tasks. It is a massive help for me.
  - noobly 1y ago
    It’s weird how divisive it is. For me it’s completely dependent on the quality of the output. Lately, it’s been more of a hinderance.
  - majormajor 1y ago
    What home tasks do you use it for? It's hard for me to imagine many. It's not doing the dishes or watering the plants. If I wanted to rearrange the room I could have it mock up some images, I guess...
    - joemazerino 1y ago
      Figuring out which fertilizer, how often to water and sun placement for the plants is a useful AI request.
      - ht_th 1y ago
        Is it? It'll take a while for fertilizer and sun placement to take visually effect, and there's risk that short term effects aren't indicative of long term effects. How can you verify the recommendations are sound, valid, safe, complete, etc., without trying them out? And trying out unsound, invalid, unsafe, incomplete, etc., recommendations might result in dead plants in a couple of weeks.
        lithocarpus 1y ago
        Eh, for something like this the cost of it being wrong might be pretty small, but I'd bet odds are good that its recommendations will be better than whatever I might randomly come up with without doing any research. And I don't have the time to do the research on normal old google where it's really hard to find exactly what I want. I've found it immensely helpful for giving real world recommendations about things like this, that I know how to find on my own but don't have the time to do all the reading and synthesizing.
        Dilettante_ 1y ago
        I personally use chatgpt for initial discovery on these sorts of problems, maybe ask a probing question or two and then go back to traditional search engines to get a very rough second opinion(which might also lead to another round of questions). By the end of that process I'll either have seen that the llm is not helpful for that particular problem, or have an answer that I'm "reasonably confident" is "good enough" to use for something medium to low risk like potentially killing a plant. And I got there within 10-20 minutes, half of that being me just reading the 'bots summary.
  - CuriouslyC 1y ago
    That's an interesting perspective, I don't think it's an innate thing though, I think it's a mindset issue. Humans are adaptable, but we're even more stubborn.
- serpix 1y ago
  A very good tip: you get one chance to prompt them to a new path failing that clear the context and start again from the current premise. Use only actionable prompts, negations don't work on ai and they don't work on people.
agency 1y ago
> I’m now tackling tasks I wouldn’t have even considered two or three years ago Ok, so subjective
- dotslashmain 1y ago
  any objective measure of "productivity" (when it comes to knowledge work) is, when you dig down into it enough, ultimately subjective.
- moralestapia 1y ago
  "Not done" vs "Done" is as objective as it gets.
  - miyoji 1y ago
    You obviously have never worked a company that spends time arguing about the "definition of done". It's one of the most subjective topics I know about.
    - vorticalbox 1y ago
      At work we call this scope creep.
    - fbxio 1y ago
      It removes ambiguity. Everyone knows when work is truly considered done, avoiding rework, surprises, and finger-pointing down the line.
    - ycombigators 1y ago
      Sounds like a company is not adequately defining what the deliverables are. Task: Walk to the shops & buy some milk. Deliverables: 1. Video of walking to the shops (including capturing the newspaper for that day at the local shop) 2. Reciept from local store for milk. 3. Physical bottle of Milk.
      - tbossanova 1y ago
kenjackson 1y ago
This. I had this long standing dispute that I just never had the energy to look up what needed to be done to resolve it. I just told it to ChatGPT and it generated everything -- including the emails I needed to send and who to send them to. Two weeks later and it was taken care of. I had sat on it for literally 3 months until then. If I could have something that said, "Here are some things that it looks like you're procrastinating on -- do you want me to get started on them for you?" -- that would probably be crazy useful.
- meowface 1y ago
  Exactly. Agentic LLMs are amazing for people who suffer from chronic akrasia.
  - rosstex 1y ago
    OH wow, a word to describe me
    - _9ptr 1y ago
      The latin word for that is "incontinentia".
  - latexr 1y ago
    Those are exactly the people who shouldn’t use these tools. They’ll be sucked in to whatever bullshit the LLM peddles them and become unable to leave.
    - meowface 1y ago
      As long as it's helping them be productive, I don't really see an issue with that. Going from doing nothing to doing something is a net boost.
      - latexr 1y ago
        But it’s not helping them “be productive” (which is a horrible metric anyway, life is not about productivity above everything else), it’s sucking their lives and severing their relationships and connection to the real world. https://archive.ph/20250924025805/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/technology/ai-chatbots-delusions-chatgpt.html https://archive.ph/20250924025805/https://www.nytimes.com/20... https://archive.is/26aHF https://archive.is/26aHF
OtherShrezzing 1y ago
> I’m now tackling tasks I wouldn’t have even considered two or three years ago Could you give some examples, and an indication of your level of experience in the domains? The statement has a much different meaning if you were a junior developer 2 years ago versus a staff engineer.
- PeterFBell 1y ago
  I have been coding on and off (more off than on) for 47 years. I kinda stopped paying attention when we got past jquery and was never a fan of prototypical inheritance. Never built anything with tailwind, Next.js, etc. After spending some time writing copy, user stories and a design brief (all iterative with ChatGPT) cursor one shot my (simple) web app and I was live (once I'd spent a couple hours documenting my requirements and writing my copy) in 20 minutes of vibe coding. I've been adding small features in a language I don't program in using libraries I'm not familiar with thhat meet my modest functional requirements in a couple minutes each. I work with an LLM to refine my prompt, put it into cursor, run the app locally, look at the diffs, commit, push and I'm live on vercel within a minute or two. I don't have any good metrics for productivity, so I'm 100% subjective but I can say that even if I'd been building in Rails (it's been ~4 years but I coded in it for a decade) it would have taken me at least 8 hours to have an app where I was happy with both the functionality and the look and feel so a 10x improvement in productivity for that task feels about right. And having a "buddy" I can discuss a project with makes activation energy lower allowing me to complete more. Also, YC videos I don't have the time to watch, I get a transcript, feed into chatGTP, ask for the key take aways I could apply to my business (it's in a project where it has context on stage, industry, maturity, business goals, key challenges, etc) so I get the benefits of 90 minutes of listening plus maybe 15 minutes of summarizing, reviewing and synthesis in typically 5-6 minutes - and it'd be quicker if I built a pipeline (something I'm vibe coding next month) Wouldn't want to do business without it.
  - majormajor 1y ago
    How do you deal with security for web stuff? I wouldn't host anything vibe-coded publicly because I'm not enough of an expert in web/frontend to even double-check that it's not generating some giant holes.
stavros 1y ago
Same. It takes the drudgery out of creating, so I can at least start the projects. Then I can go down into the detail just enough that the AI doesn't produce crap, but without needing to write the actual writes of code myself. Hell, in the past few days I started making something to help me write documents for work (https://www.writelucid.cc https://www.writelucid.cc) and a viewer for all my blood tests (https://github.com/skorokithakis/bt-viewer https://github.com/skorokithakis/bt-viewer), and I don't think I would have made either without an LLM.
- lxgr 1y ago
  Same here. I’ve single-shot created a few Raycast plugins for TLV decoding that save me several seconds to a few minutes per task which I use almost daily at work. Would have never done that without LLMs.
ryukoposting 1y ago
What tasks is it doing 50% of the work on for you?
- evilduck 1y ago
  Not who you asked, but I upgraded NextJS in a couple of repos by just telling Claude Code to do it. I've had it swap out and upgrade libraries successfully in one shot too. It will usually create good enough Page Objects for E2Es and scaffold out the test file, which speeds up the development process a bit. Same for upgrading Node versions in some Lambda projects, just tell it to go and come back later. Instruct it to run the test and build steps and it's also like having a mini CI system running too. Personally, I think it really shines at doing the boring maintenance and tech debt work. None of these are hard or complex tasks but they all take up time and for a buck or two in tokens I can have it doing simple but tedious things while I'm working on something else.
  - ryukoposting 1y ago
    > Personally, I think it really shines at doing the boring maintenance and tech debt work. It shines at doing the boring maintenance and tech debt work for web. My experiences with it, as a firmware dev, have been the diametric opposite of yours. The only model I've had any luck with as an agent is Sonnet 4 in reasoning mode. At an absolutely glacial pace, it will sometimes write some almost-correct unit tests. This is only valuable because I can have it to do that while I'm in a meeting or reading emails. The only reason I use it at all is because it's coming out of my company's pocket, not mine.
    - evilduck 1y ago
      For sure. There's tons of training data in the models for the JS and TS language and the specific tasks I outlined, but not specifically just the web, I have several Node or Bun + Typescript + SQLite CLI utilities that it also helps with. I definitely pick my battles and lean in to what it works best for though. Anything it appears to struggle at I'll just do manually and develop it like we always did. It's rarely not a net positive to me but it's very frequently a negligible improvement. Anything that doesn't pay off in spades I typically don't try again until new models release or new tools or approaches are available.
calrain 1y ago
My programming productivity has improved a lot with Claude Code. One thing I've noticed is that I don't have a circle of people where I can discus programming with, and having an LLM to answer questions and wireframe up code has been amazing. My job doesn't require programming, but programming makes my job much easier, and the benefits have been great.
scragz 1y ago
there's some minority that's in the venn diagram of being good at programming, being good at AI, then also being good at using AI for programming (which is mostly project management), and if everything aligns then there are superhuman productivity gains. I'm tackling projects solo I never would have even attempted before but I could see people getting bad results and giving up.
- serpix 1y ago
  Same here! Started learning self hosted k3s, with terraform and IaC and all the bells and whistles. I would never have had the energy to look up how to even get started. In three hours I have a cluster.
  - lelanthran 1y ago
    Doesn't sound like you learned it, sounds like it did it for you, using you as the tool. IOW, can you redo it by yourself? If you can't then you did not learn it.
    - sally_glance 1y ago
      Is that really a fair comparison? I think the amount of people who can memorize each and every configuration item is vanishingly small... even when I was bootstrapping k8s clusters before the dawn of LLMs I had to lookup current documentation and maybe some up to date tutorials. Knowing the abstract steps and tripwires yes, but details will always have to be looked up. If just not to miss any new developments.
      - lelanthran 1y ago
        > Is that really a fair comparison? Well, yes it is; you can't very well claim to have learned something if you are unable to do it.
        alvah 1y ago
scrollaway 1y ago
Incredible how many people here just don’t believe you because it doesn’t reflect their personal experience. I want to second your experience as I’ve had the same as well. Tackling SO many more tasks than before and at such a crazy pace. I’ve started entire businesses I wouldn’t have just because of AI. But at the same time, some people have weird blockers and just can’t use AI. I don’t know what it is about it - maybe it’s a mental block? Wrong frame of mind? It’s those same people who end up saying “I spend more time fighting the ai and refining prompts than I would on the end task”. I’m very curious what it is that actually causes this divide.
- billy99k 1y ago
  Now is a good time to use it to make money, before it gets to the point where everyone is using it. I've been using it for almost a year now, and it's definitely improved my productivity. I've reduced work that normally takes a few hours to 20 minutes. Where I work, my manager was going to hire a junior developer and ended up getting a pro subscription to Claude instead. I also think it will be a concern for that 50-something developer that gets laid off in the coming years, has no experience with AI, and then can't find a job because it's a requirement. My cousin was a 53 year old developer and got laid off two years ago. He looked for a job for 6 months and then ended up becoming an auto mechanic at half the salary, when his unemployment ran out. The problem is that he was the subject matter expert on old technology and virtually nobody uses it anymore.
fsloth 1y ago
”I’m now tackling tasks I wouldn’t have even considered two or three years ago” This. 100x this.

svachalek 1y ago

I don't think it's helped me do anything I couldn't do, in fact I've learned it's far easier to do hard things myself than trying to prompt an AI out of the ditches it will dig trying to do it. But I also find it's great for getting painful and annoying tasks out of the way that I really can't motivate to do myself.

wiml 1y ago
I think there might be cases, for some people or some tasks, where the difficulty of filling in a blank page is greater than the difficulty of fixing an entire page of errors. Even if you have to do all the same mental work, it feels like a different category of work.
cheema33 1y ago
> I don't think it's helped me do anything I couldn't do I am seeing a pattern here. It appears that AI isn't for everyone. Not everyone's personality may be a good fit for using AI. Just like not everybody is a good candidate for being a software dev, or police officer etc. I used to think that it is a tool. Like a car is. Everybody would want one. But that appears not be the case. For me, I used AI every day as a tool, for work and and home tasks. It is a massive help for me.
- noobly 1y ago
  It’s weird how divisive it is. For me it’s completely dependent on the quality of the output. Lately, it’s been more of a hinderance.
- majormajor 1y ago
  What home tasks do you use it for? It's hard for me to imagine many. It's not doing the dishes or watering the plants. If I wanted to rearrange the room I could have it mock up some images, I guess...
  - joemazerino 1y ago
    Figuring out which fertilizer, how often to water and sun placement for the plants is a useful AI request.
    - ht_th 1y ago
      Is it? It'll take a while for fertilizer and sun placement to take visually effect, and there's risk that short term effects aren't indicative of long term effects. How can you verify the recommendations are sound, valid, safe, complete, etc., without trying them out? And trying out unsound, invalid, unsafe, incomplete, etc., recommendations might result in dead plants in a couple of weeks.
      - lithocarpus 1y ago
        Eh, for something like this the cost of it being wrong might be pretty small, but I'd bet odds are good that its recommendations will be better than whatever I might randomly come up with without doing any research. And I don't have the time to do the research on normal old google where it's really hard to find exactly what I want. I've found it immensely helpful for giving real world recommendations about things like this, that I know how to find on my own but don't have the time to do all the reading and synthesizing.
      - Dilettante_ 1y ago
        I personally use chatgpt for initial discovery on these sorts of problems, maybe ask a probing question or two and then go back to traditional search engines to get a very rough second opinion(which might also lead to another round of questions). By the end of that process I'll either have seen that the llm is not helpful for that particular problem, or have an answer that I'm "reasonably confident" is "good enough" to use for something medium to low risk like potentially killing a plant. And I got there within 10-20 minutes, half of that being me just reading the 'bots summary.
- CuriouslyC 1y ago
  That's an interesting perspective, I don't think it's an innate thing though, I think it's a mindset issue. Humans are adaptable, but we're even more stubborn.
serpix 1y ago
A very good tip: you get one chance to prompt them to a new path failing that clear the context and start again from the current premise. Use only actionable prompts, negations don't work on ai and they don't work on people.

agency 1y ago

> I’m now tackling tasks I wouldn’t have even considered two or three years ago Ok, so subjective

dotslashmain 1y ago
any objective measure of "productivity" (when it comes to knowledge work) is, when you dig down into it enough, ultimately subjective.
moralestapia 1y ago
"Not done" vs "Done" is as objective as it gets.
- miyoji 1y ago
  You obviously have never worked a company that spends time arguing about the "definition of done". It's one of the most subjective topics I know about.
  - vorticalbox 1y ago
    At work we call this scope creep.
  - fbxio 1y ago
    It removes ambiguity. Everyone knows when work is truly considered done, avoiding rework, surprises, and finger-pointing down the line.
  - ycombigators 1y ago
    Sounds like a company is not adequately defining what the deliverables are. Task: Walk to the shops & buy some milk. Deliverables: 1. Video of walking to the shops (including capturing the newspaper for that day at the local shop) 2. Reciept from local store for milk. 3. Physical bottle of Milk.
    - tbossanova 1y ago

kenjackson 1y ago

This. I had this long standing dispute that I just never had the energy to look up what needed to be done to resolve it. I just told it to ChatGPT and it generated everything -- including the emails I needed to send and who to send them to. Two weeks later and it was taken care of. I had sat on it for literally 3 months until then. If I could have something that said, "Here are some things that it looks like you're procrastinating on -- do you want me to get started on them for you?" -- that would probably be crazy useful.

meowface 1y ago
Exactly. Agentic LLMs are amazing for people who suffer from chronic akrasia.
- rosstex 1y ago
  OH wow, a word to describe me
  - _9ptr 1y ago
    The latin word for that is "incontinentia".
- latexr 1y ago
  Those are exactly the people who shouldn’t use these tools. They’ll be sucked in to whatever bullshit the LLM peddles them and become unable to leave.
  - meowface 1y ago
    As long as it's helping them be productive, I don't really see an issue with that. Going from doing nothing to doing something is a net boost.
    - latexr 1y ago
      But it’s not helping them “be productive” (which is a horrible metric anyway, life is not about productivity above everything else), it’s sucking their lives and severing their relationships and connection to the real world. https://archive.ph/20250924025805/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/technology/ai-chatbots-delusions-chatgpt.html https://archive.ph/20250924025805/https://www.nytimes.com/20... https://archive.is/26aHF https://archive.is/26aHF

OtherShrezzing 1y ago

> I’m now tackling tasks I wouldn’t have even considered two or three years ago Could you give some examples, and an indication of your level of experience in the domains? The statement has a much different meaning if you were a junior developer 2 years ago versus a staff engineer.

PeterFBell 1y ago
I have been coding on and off (more off than on) for 47 years. I kinda stopped paying attention when we got past jquery and was never a fan of prototypical inheritance. Never built anything with tailwind, Next.js, etc. After spending some time writing copy, user stories and a design brief (all iterative with ChatGPT) cursor one shot my (simple) web app and I was live (once I'd spent a couple hours documenting my requirements and writing my copy) in 20 minutes of vibe coding. I've been adding small features in a language I don't program in using libraries I'm not familiar with thhat meet my modest functional requirements in a couple minutes each. I work with an LLM to refine my prompt, put it into cursor, run the app locally, look at the diffs, commit, push and I'm live on vercel within a minute or two. I don't have any good metrics for productivity, so I'm 100% subjective but I can say that even if I'd been building in Rails (it's been ~4 years but I coded in it for a decade) it would have taken me at least 8 hours to have an app where I was happy with both the functionality and the look and feel so a 10x improvement in productivity for that task feels about right. And having a "buddy" I can discuss a project with makes activation energy lower allowing me to complete more. Also, YC videos I don't have the time to watch, I get a transcript, feed into chatGTP, ask for the key take aways I could apply to my business (it's in a project where it has context on stage, industry, maturity, business goals, key challenges, etc) so I get the benefits of 90 minutes of listening plus maybe 15 minutes of summarizing, reviewing and synthesis in typically 5-6 minutes - and it'd be quicker if I built a pipeline (something I'm vibe coding next month) Wouldn't want to do business without it.
- majormajor 1y ago
  How do you deal with security for web stuff? I wouldn't host anything vibe-coded publicly because I'm not enough of an expert in web/frontend to even double-check that it's not generating some giant holes.

stavros 1y ago

Same. It takes the drudgery out of creating, so I can at least start the projects. Then I can go down into the detail just enough that the AI doesn't produce crap, but without needing to write the actual writes of code myself. Hell, in the past few days I started making something to help me write documents for work (https://www.writelucid.cc https://www.writelucid.cc) and a viewer for all my blood tests (https://github.com/skorokithakis/bt-viewer https://github.com/skorokithakis/bt-viewer), and I don't think I would have made either without an LLM.

lxgr 1y ago
Same here. I’ve single-shot created a few Raycast plugins for TLV decoding that save me several seconds to a few minutes per task which I use almost daily at work. Would have never done that without LLMs.

ryukoposting 1y ago

What tasks is it doing 50% of the work on for you?

evilduck 1y ago
Not who you asked, but I upgraded NextJS in a couple of repos by just telling Claude Code to do it. I've had it swap out and upgrade libraries successfully in one shot too. It will usually create good enough Page Objects for E2Es and scaffold out the test file, which speeds up the development process a bit. Same for upgrading Node versions in some Lambda projects, just tell it to go and come back later. Instruct it to run the test and build steps and it's also like having a mini CI system running too. Personally, I think it really shines at doing the boring maintenance and tech debt work. None of these are hard or complex tasks but they all take up time and for a buck or two in tokens I can have it doing simple but tedious things while I'm working on something else.
- ryukoposting 1y ago
  > Personally, I think it really shines at doing the boring maintenance and tech debt work. It shines at doing the boring maintenance and tech debt work for web. My experiences with it, as a firmware dev, have been the diametric opposite of yours. The only model I've had any luck with as an agent is Sonnet 4 in reasoning mode. At an absolutely glacial pace, it will sometimes write some almost-correct unit tests. This is only valuable because I can have it to do that while I'm in a meeting or reading emails. The only reason I use it at all is because it's coming out of my company's pocket, not mine.
  - evilduck 1y ago
    For sure. There's tons of training data in the models for the JS and TS language and the specific tasks I outlined, but not specifically just the web, I have several Node or Bun + Typescript + SQLite CLI utilities that it also helps with. I definitely pick my battles and lean in to what it works best for though. Anything it appears to struggle at I'll just do manually and develop it like we always did. It's rarely not a net positive to me but it's very frequently a negligible improvement. Anything that doesn't pay off in spades I typically don't try again until new models release or new tools or approaches are available.

calrain 1y ago

My programming productivity has improved a lot with Claude Code. One thing I've noticed is that I don't have a circle of people where I can discus programming with, and having an LLM to answer questions and wireframe up code has been amazing. My job doesn't require programming, but programming makes my job much easier, and the benefits have been great.

scragz 1y ago

there's some minority that's in the venn diagram of being good at programming, being good at AI, then also being good at using AI for programming (which is mostly project management), and if everything aligns then there are superhuman productivity gains. I'm tackling projects solo I never would have even attempted before but I could see people getting bad results and giving up.

serpix 1y ago
Same here! Started learning self hosted k3s, with terraform and IaC and all the bells and whistles. I would never have had the energy to look up how to even get started. In three hours I have a cluster.
- lelanthran 1y ago
  Doesn't sound like you learned it, sounds like it did it for you, using you as the tool. IOW, can you redo it by yourself? If you can't then you did not learn it.
  - sally_glance 1y ago
    Is that really a fair comparison? I think the amount of people who can memorize each and every configuration item is vanishingly small... even when I was bootstrapping k8s clusters before the dawn of LLMs I had to lookup current documentation and maybe some up to date tutorials. Knowing the abstract steps and tripwires yes, but details will always have to be looked up. If just not to miss any new developments.
    - lelanthran 1y ago
      > Is that really a fair comparison? Well, yes it is; you can't very well claim to have learned something if you are unable to do it.
      - alvah 1y ago

scrollaway 1y ago

Incredible how many people here just don’t believe you because it doesn’t reflect their personal experience. I want to second your experience as I’ve had the same as well. Tackling SO many more tasks than before and at such a crazy pace. I’ve started entire businesses I wouldn’t have just because of AI. But at the same time, some people have weird blockers and just can’t use AI. I don’t know what it is about it - maybe it’s a mental block? Wrong frame of mind? It’s those same people who end up saying “I spend more time fighting the ai and refining prompts than I would on the end task”. I’m very curious what it is that actually causes this divide.

billy99k 1y ago
Now is a good time to use it to make money, before it gets to the point where everyone is using it. I've been using it for almost a year now, and it's definitely improved my productivity. I've reduced work that normally takes a few hours to 20 minutes. Where I work, my manager was going to hire a junior developer and ended up getting a pro subscription to Claude instead. I also think it will be a concern for that 50-something developer that gets laid off in the coming years, has no experience with AI, and then can't find a job because it's a requirement. My cousin was a 53 year old developer and got laid off two years ago. He looked for a job for 6 months and then ended up becoming an auto mechanic at half the salary, when his unemployment ran out. The problem is that he was the subject matter expert on old technology and virtually nobody uses it anymore.

fsloth 1y ago

”I’m now tackling tasks I wouldn’t have even considered two or three years ago” This. 100x this.