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My experience with AI in the design context tends to reflect what I think is generally true about AI in the workplace: the smaller the use case, the larger the

My experience with AI in the design context tends to reflect what I think is generally true about AI in the workplace: the smaller the use case, the larger the gain. This might be the money quote, encapsulating the difference between people who say their work benefits from LLMs and those who don't. Expecting it to one-shot your entire module will leave you disappointed, using it for code completion, generating documentation, and small-scale agentic tasks frees you up from a lot of little trivial distractions.

awesome_dude 11mo ago
And bug fixes "This lump of code is producing this behaviour when I don't want to" Is a quick way to find/fix bugs (IME) BUT it requires me to understand the response (sometimes the AI hits the nail on the head, sometimes it says something that makes my brain - that's not it, but now I know exactly what it is
helterskelter 11mo ago
Honestly one the best use cases I've found for it is creating configs. It used to be that I was able to spend a week fiddling around with, say, nvim settings. Now I tell an LLM what I want and it basically gives it to me without having to do trial and error, or locating some obscure comment from 2005 that tells me what I need to know.
- mattmanser 11mo ago
  Depends what you're doing. If it's a less trodden path expect it to hallucinate some settings. Also a regular thing I see is that it adds some random other settings without comment and then when you ask it about them it goes, whoops, yeah, those aren't necessary.
m463 11mo ago
> frees you up from a lot of little trivial distractions. I think one huge issue in my life has been: getting started If AI helps with this, I think it is worth it. Even if getting started is incorrect, it sparks outrage and an "I'll fix this" momentum.
- brailsafe 11mo ago
  > If AI helps with this, I think it is worth it. Worth what? I probably agree, the greenfield rote mechanical tasks of putting together something like a basic interface, somewhat thorough unit tests, or a basic state container that maps to a complicated typed endpoint are things I'd procrastinate on or would otherwise drain my energy before I get started. But that real tangible value does need to have an agreeable *price* and *cost* depending on the context. For me, that price ceiling depends on how often and to what extent it's able to contribute to generating maximum overall value, but in terms of personal economic value (the proportion of my fixed time I'm spending on which work), if it's on an upward trend of practical utility, that means I'm actually increasing the proportion of dull tasks I'm spending my time on... potentially. Kind of like how having a car makes it so comfortable and easy and ostensibly fast to get somewhere for an individual—theoretically freeing up time to do all kinds of other activities—that some people justify endless amounts of debt to acquire them, allowing the parameters of where they're willing to live to shift further and further to the point where nearly all of their free time, energy, and money is spent on driving, all of their kids depend on driving, and society accepts it as an unavoidable necessity; all the deaths, environmental damage, side-effects of decreased physical activity and increased stress along for the ride. Likewise how various chat platforms tried to make communication so friction-less that I actually now want to exchange messages with people far less than ever before, effectively a foot gun Maybe America is once again demolishing its cities so they can plow through a freeway, and before we know it, every city will be Dallas, and every road will be like commuting between San Jose to anywhere else—metaphorically of course, but also literally in the case of infrastructure build— when will it be too late to realize that we should have just accepted the tiny bit of hardship of walking to the grocery store. ------ All of that might be a bit excessive lol, but I guess we'll find out
- judahmeek 11mo ago
  If? Shouldn't you know by now whether AI does or doesn't help with that? ;D
- ambicapter 11mo ago
  I think AI is “worth it” in that sense as long as it stays free :D
kulahan 11mo ago
An agentic git interface might be nice, though hallucinations seem like they could create a really messy problem. Still, you could just roll back in that case, I suppose. Anyways, it would be nice to tell it where I'm trying to get to and let it figure out how to get there.
- jibal 11mo ago
  Lots of things might be nice when the expenditure accounts for 92% of GDP growth.
ninetyninenine 11mo ago
What am I finding is that the size of the "small" use case is becoming larger and larger as time goes by and the models improve.

awesome_dude 11mo ago

And bug fixes "This lump of code is producing this behaviour when I don't want to" Is a quick way to find/fix bugs (IME) BUT it requires me to understand the response (sometimes the AI hits the nail on the head, sometimes it says something that makes my brain - that's not it, but now I know exactly what it is

helterskelter 11mo ago

Honestly one the best use cases I've found for it is creating configs. It used to be that I was able to spend a week fiddling around with, say, nvim settings. Now I tell an LLM what I want and it basically gives it to me without having to do trial and error, or locating some obscure comment from 2005 that tells me what I need to know.

mattmanser 11mo ago
Depends what you're doing. If it's a less trodden path expect it to hallucinate some settings. Also a regular thing I see is that it adds some random other settings without comment and then when you ask it about them it goes, whoops, yeah, those aren't necessary.

m463 11mo ago

> frees you up from a lot of little trivial distractions. I think one huge issue in my life has been: getting started If AI helps with this, I think it is worth it. Even if getting started is incorrect, it sparks outrage and an "I'll fix this" momentum.

brailsafe 11mo ago
> If AI helps with this, I think it is worth it. Worth what? I probably agree, the greenfield rote mechanical tasks of putting together something like a basic interface, somewhat thorough unit tests, or a basic state container that maps to a complicated typed endpoint are things I'd procrastinate on or would otherwise drain my energy before I get started. But that real tangible value does need to have an agreeable *price* and *cost* depending on the context. For me, that price ceiling depends on how often and to what extent it's able to contribute to generating maximum overall value, but in terms of personal economic value (the proportion of my fixed time I'm spending on which work), if it's on an upward trend of practical utility, that means I'm actually increasing the proportion of dull tasks I'm spending my time on... potentially. Kind of like how having a car makes it so comfortable and easy and ostensibly fast to get somewhere for an individual—theoretically freeing up time to do all kinds of other activities—that some people justify endless amounts of debt to acquire them, allowing the parameters of where they're willing to live to shift further and further to the point where nearly all of their free time, energy, and money is spent on driving, all of their kids depend on driving, and society accepts it as an unavoidable necessity; all the deaths, environmental damage, side-effects of decreased physical activity and increased stress along for the ride. Likewise how various chat platforms tried to make communication so friction-less that I actually now want to exchange messages with people far less than ever before, effectively a foot gun Maybe America is once again demolishing its cities so they can plow through a freeway, and before we know it, every city will be Dallas, and every road will be like commuting between San Jose to anywhere else—metaphorically of course, but also literally in the case of infrastructure build— when will it be too late to realize that we should have just accepted the tiny bit of hardship of walking to the grocery store. ------ All of that might be a bit excessive lol, but I guess we'll find out
judahmeek 11mo ago
If? Shouldn't you know by now whether AI does or doesn't help with that? ;D
ambicapter 11mo ago
I think AI is “worth it” in that sense as long as it stays free :D

kulahan 11mo ago

An agentic git interface might be nice, though hallucinations seem like they could create a really messy problem. Still, you could just roll back in that case, I suppose. Anyways, it would be nice to tell it where I'm trying to get to and let it figure out how to get there.

jibal 11mo ago
Lots of things might be nice when the expenditure accounts for 92% of GDP growth.

ninetyninenine 11mo ago

What am I finding is that the size of the "small" use case is becoming larger and larger as time goes by and the models improve.