7 ms·

The number of use cases for which I use AI is actually rapidly decreasing. I don't use it anymore for coding, I don't use it anymore for writing, I don't use it

by lmf4lol 11mo ago

The number of use cases for which I use AI is actually rapidly decreasing. I don't use it anymore for coding, I don't use it anymore for writing, I don't use it anymore for talking about philosophy, etc. And I use 0 agents. even though I am (was) the author of multiple MCP servers. It's just all too brittle and too annoying. I feel exhausted when talking to much to those "things".... I am also so bored of all those crap papers being published about LLM. Sometimes, there are some gems but its all so low-effort. LLM papers bore the hell out of me... Anyway, By cutting out AI for most of my stuff, I really improved my well-being. I found the joy back in manual programming, because I am one of the few soon that will actually understand stuff :-). I found the joy in writing with a fountain pen in a notebook and since then, I retain so much more information. Also a great opportunity for the future, when the majority will be dumbed down even more. And for philosophical interaction. I joined an online University and just read the actual books of the great thinkers and discuss them with people and knowledgable teachers. For what I use AI still is to correct my sentences (sometimes) :-). It's kinda the same than when I cut all(!) Social Media a while ago. It was such a great feeling to finally get rid ot all those mind-screwing algorithms. I don't blame anyone if they use AI. Do what you like.

ciconia 11mo ago
> I don't use it anymore for coding I'm curious, can you expand on this? Why did you start using coding agents, and why did you stop?
- estebarb 11mo ago
  I cannot talk for OP, but I have been researching ways to make ML models learn faster, which obviously is a path that will be full of funny failures. I'm not able to use ChatGPT or Gemini to edit my code, because they will just replace my formulas with SimCLR and call it done.
  - RealityVoid 11mo ago
    That's it, these machines don't have an original thought in there. They have a lot of data so they seem like they know stuff, they clearly know stuff you don't.But go off the beaten path and they gently but annoyingly try to steer you back. And that's fine for some things. Horrible if you want to do non-conventional things.
- lmf4lol 11mo ago
  I started to code with them when Cursor came out. I've built multiple projects with Claude and thought that this is the freaking future. Until all joy disappeared and I began to hate the whole process. I felt like I didn't do anything meaningful anymore, just telling a stupid machine what I want and let it produce very ugly output. So a few months, I just stopped. I went back to VIM even.... I am pretty idealistic coder, who always thought of it as an art in itself. And using LLMs robbed me of the artistic aspect of actually creating something. The process of creating is what I love and like and what gives me inspiration and energy to actually do it. When a machine robs me of that, why would I continue to do it? Money then being the only answer... A dreadful existence. I am not a Marxist, probably bceause I don't really understand him, but I think LLM is "detachment of work" applied to coders IMHO. Someone should really do a phenomenological study on the "Dasein" of a coder with LLM. Funnily, I don't see any difference in productivity at all. I have my own company and I still manage to get everything done on deadline.
  - sumedh 11mo ago
    > let it produce very ugly output. Did you try changing your prompts?
  - malkia 11mo ago
    I'll need to read more about this ("Dasein") as I was not aware of it. Yesterday our "adoptive" family had a very nice Thanksgiving, and we were considered youngesters (close to our 50s) among our hosts & guests and this came multiple times when we were discussing AI among many other things - "The joy of work", the "human touch", etc. I usually don't fall for these "nice feel" talks, but now that you mentioned this it hit me. What would I do if something like AI completely replace me (if ever). Thank you, and sorry my thoughts are all over...
  - dwaltrip 11mo ago
    I hear you, sometimes it is easier to just do it myself. You can tell the AI to change the "ugly code" to be how you like. Work for me most of the time. Even better, tell the AI to not write it that way in the first place. It writes a plan, you skim the plan, and tell it to change it. These tools are not going away, so we need to learn how to use them effectively.
- noodletheworld 11mo ago
  Skill declines over time, without practice. If you speak fluent japanese, and you dont practice, you will remember being fluent but no longer actually be able to speak fluently. Its true for many things; writing code is not like riding a bike. You cant not write code for a year and then come back at the same skill level. Using an agent is not writing code; but using an agent effectively requires that you have the skill of writing code. So, after using a tool that automatically writes code for you, that you probably give some superficial review to, you will find, over time, that you are worse at coding. You can sigh and shake your head and stamp your feet and disagree, but its flat out a fact of life: If you dont practice, you lose skill. I, personally found, this happening, so I now do 50/50 time: 1 week with AI, 1 week with strictly no AI. If the no AI week “feels hard” then I extend it for another week, to make sure I retain the skills I feel I should have. Anecdotally, here at $corp, I see people struggling because they are offloading the “make an initial plan to do x that I can review” step too much, and losing the ability to plan software effectively. Dont be that guy. If you offload all your responsibilities to an agent and sit playing with your phone, you are making yourself entirely replacable.
seanmcdirmid 11mo ago
The economics of the force multiplier is too high to ignore, and I’m guessing an SWEs who don’t learn how to use it consistently and effectively will be out of the job market in 5 or so years.
- data-ottawa 11mo ago
  I’m sceptical The models seem to still (claude opus 4.5) not get things right, and miss edge cases, and work code in a way that’s not very structured. I use them daily, but I often have to rewrite a lot to reshape the codebase to a point where it makes sense to use the model again. I’m sure they’ll continue to get better, but out of a job better in 5 years? I’m not betting on it.
  - seanmcdirmid 11mo ago
    Ya, you have to shape your code base, not just that but get your AI to document your code base and come with some sort of pipeline to have different AI check things. It’s fine to be skeptical, and I definitely hope I’m wrong, but it really is looking bad for SWEs who don’t start adopting at this point. It’s a bad bet in my opinion, at least have your F-u money built up in 5 if you aren’t going full in on it.
    - kranke155 11mo ago
      Why would you go full on ? There is no learning curve it seems like. What is there to learn about using AI to code?
      - bdangubic 11mo ago
        I hope you are joking and/or being sarcastic with this comment…
        swatcoder 11mo ago
        I don't think they really are. There is, effectively, a "learning curve" required to make them useful right now, and a lot of churn on technique, because the tools remain profoundly immature and their results are delicate and inconsistent. To get anything out of them and trust what you get, you need to figure out how to hold them right for your task. But presuming that there's something real here, and there does seem to be something, eventually all that will smooth out and late adopters who decide want to use the tools will be able onboard themselves plenty fast. The whole vision of them is to make the work easier, more accessible, and more productive, after all. Having a big learning curve doesn't align with that vision. Unless they happen to make you more significantly productive today on the tasks you want to pursue, which only seems to be true for select people, there's no particular reason to be an early adopter.
ToucanLoucan 11mo ago
I technically use it for programming, though really for two broad things: * Sorting. I have never been able to get my head around sorting arrays, especially in the Swift syntax. Generating them is awesome. * Extensions/Categories in Swift/Objective C. "Write me an extension to the String class that will accept an array of Int8s as an argument, and include safety checks." Beautiful. That said I don't know why you'd use it for anything more. Sometimes I'll have it generate like, the skeleton of something I'm working on, a view controller with X number of outlets of Y type, with so and so functions stubbed in, but even that's going down because as I build I realize my initial idea can be improved.
- malkia 11mo ago
  I've been using LLMs as calculators for words, like they can summarize, spot, correct, but often can be wrong about this - especially when I have to touch language I haven't used in a while (Python, Powershell, Rust as recent examples), or sub-system (SuperPrefetch on WIndows, Or why audio is dropping on coworker's machines when they run some of the tools, and like this... don't ask me why), and all kinds of obscure subjects (where I'm sure experts exists, but when you need them they are not easy (as in "nearby") to reach for, and even then might not help) But now my grain of salt has increased - it's still helpful, but much like a real calculator - there is limit (in precision), and what it can do. For one it still can't make good jokes :) (my litmus test)
redwood 11mo ago
I liken it to a drug that feels good over the near term but has longer term impacts.. sometimes you have to get things out of your system. It's fun while it lasts and then the novelty wears off. (And just as some people have the tolerance to do drugs for much longer periods of time than others, I think the same is the case for AI)
smt88 11mo ago
No one uses agents. They're a myth that Marc Benioff willed into existence. No one who regularly uses LLMs would ever trust one to do unattended work.
- Ferret7446 11mo ago
  You managed to move the goalposts in two sentences; if you realized that your first claim is wrong you probably should have rewrote it rather than try to save it at the end.
  - chasing0entropy 11mo ago
    Agent = agentic LLM LLM = co-pilot, Gemini, Claude, Mistral chat No one who uses an LLM would trust an agentic LLM
  - smt88 11mo ago
    You seem to be using a different definition of "agent(ic)" than me and perhaps most people, because your comment makes no sense. I will repeat that no organization has adopted LLMs to work independently as agents, doing work in the background without human supervision. Writing code doesn't could because the code is reviewed and easily reverted. Sending emails, writing and sending legal contracts, etc. would count.
fpauser 11mo ago
This is also my experience with (so called) AI. Coding with AI feels like working with a dumb colleague that constantly forgets. It feels so much better to manually write code.
dinvlad 11mo ago
This is the best take
raincole 11mo ago
> Typewriters and printing presses take away some, but your robot would deprive us of all. Your robot takes over the galleys. Soon it, or other robots, would take over the original writing, the searching of the sources, the checking and crosschecking of passages, perhaps even the deduction of conclusions. What would that leave the scholar? One thing only, the barren decisions concerning what orders to give the robot next! From Issac Asimov. Something I have been contemplating a lot lately.
ryandv 11mo ago
I commend you for your choices. This is the way in the 2020s.
stuaxo 11mo ago
I use it for a lot of stuff, but ultimately redo almost all of it - which I think is right. The LLM is the mush of everyone's stuff like the juice at the bottom of the bin is a mix of all the restaurants food. The writing out the other end of the LLM is bland. What it IS useful for is seeing a wrong thing and then going and making my own. I still use it for various little scripts and menial tasks. The push for this stuff to replace creativity is disgusting. Sticking LLMs in every place is just crap, I've had enough.
senko 11mo ago
It sounds like you went in deep for a while, and then rebounded. Good for you (no sarcasm, I mean it). We should all find little joys in our life and avoid things that deaden us. If AI is that for you, I'd say you made a good decision.

by lmf4lol 11mo ago

ciconia 11mo ago

> I don't use it anymore for coding I'm curious, can you expand on this? Why did you start using coding agents, and why did you stop?

estebarb 11mo ago
I cannot talk for OP, but I have been researching ways to make ML models learn faster, which obviously is a path that will be full of funny failures. I'm not able to use ChatGPT or Gemini to edit my code, because they will just replace my formulas with SimCLR and call it done.
- RealityVoid 11mo ago
  That's it, these machines don't have an original thought in there. They have a lot of data so they seem like they know stuff, they clearly know stuff you don't.But go off the beaten path and they gently but annoyingly try to steer you back. And that's fine for some things. Horrible if you want to do non-conventional things.
lmf4lol 11mo ago
I started to code with them when Cursor came out. I've built multiple projects with Claude and thought that this is the freaking future. Until all joy disappeared and I began to hate the whole process. I felt like I didn't do anything meaningful anymore, just telling a stupid machine what I want and let it produce very ugly output. So a few months, I just stopped. I went back to VIM even.... I am pretty idealistic coder, who always thought of it as an art in itself. And using LLMs robbed me of the artistic aspect of actually creating something. The process of creating is what I love and like and what gives me inspiration and energy to actually do it. When a machine robs me of that, why would I continue to do it? Money then being the only answer... A dreadful existence. I am not a Marxist, probably bceause I don't really understand him, but I think LLM is "detachment of work" applied to coders IMHO. Someone should really do a phenomenological study on the "Dasein" of a coder with LLM. Funnily, I don't see any difference in productivity at all. I have my own company and I still manage to get everything done on deadline.
- sumedh 11mo ago
  > let it produce very ugly output. Did you try changing your prompts?
- malkia 11mo ago
  I'll need to read more about this ("Dasein") as I was not aware of it. Yesterday our "adoptive" family had a very nice Thanksgiving, and we were considered youngesters (close to our 50s) among our hosts & guests and this came multiple times when we were discussing AI among many other things - "The joy of work", the "human touch", etc. I usually don't fall for these "nice feel" talks, but now that you mentioned this it hit me. What would I do if something like AI completely replace me (if ever). Thank you, and sorry my thoughts are all over...
- dwaltrip 11mo ago
  I hear you, sometimes it is easier to just do it myself. You can tell the AI to change the "ugly code" to be how you like. Work for me most of the time. Even better, tell the AI to not write it that way in the first place. It writes a plan, you skim the plan, and tell it to change it. These tools are not going away, so we need to learn how to use them effectively.
noodletheworld 11mo ago
Skill declines over time, without practice. If you speak fluent japanese, and you dont practice, you will remember being fluent but no longer actually be able to speak fluently. Its true for many things; writing code is not like riding a bike. You cant not write code for a year and then come back at the same skill level. Using an agent is not writing code; but using an agent effectively requires that you have the skill of writing code. So, after using a tool that automatically writes code for you, that you probably give some superficial review to, you will find, over time, that you are worse at coding. You can sigh and shake your head and stamp your feet and disagree, but its flat out a fact of life: If you dont practice, you lose skill. I, personally found, this happening, so I now do 50/50 time: 1 week with AI, 1 week with strictly no AI. If the no AI week “feels hard” then I extend it for another week, to make sure I retain the skills I feel I should have. Anecdotally, here at $corp, I see people struggling because they are offloading the “make an initial plan to do x that I can review” step too much, and losing the ability to plan software effectively. Dont be that guy. If you offload all your responsibilities to an agent and sit playing with your phone, you are making yourself entirely replacable.

seanmcdirmid 11mo ago

The economics of the force multiplier is too high to ignore, and I’m guessing an SWEs who don’t learn how to use it consistently and effectively will be out of the job market in 5 or so years.

data-ottawa 11mo ago
I’m sceptical The models seem to still (claude opus 4.5) not get things right, and miss edge cases, and work code in a way that’s not very structured. I use them daily, but I often have to rewrite a lot to reshape the codebase to a point where it makes sense to use the model again. I’m sure they’ll continue to get better, but out of a job better in 5 years? I’m not betting on it.
- seanmcdirmid 11mo ago
  Ya, you have to shape your code base, not just that but get your AI to document your code base and come with some sort of pipeline to have different AI check things. It’s fine to be skeptical, and I definitely hope I’m wrong, but it really is looking bad for SWEs who don’t start adopting at this point. It’s a bad bet in my opinion, at least have your F-u money built up in 5 if you aren’t going full in on it.
  - kranke155 11mo ago
    Why would you go full on ? There is no learning curve it seems like. What is there to learn about using AI to code?
    - bdangubic 11mo ago
      I hope you are joking and/or being sarcastic with this comment…
      - swatcoder 11mo ago
        I don't think they really are. There is, effectively, a "learning curve" required to make them useful right now, and a lot of churn on technique, because the tools remain profoundly immature and their results are delicate and inconsistent. To get anything out of them and trust what you get, you need to figure out how to hold them right for your task. But presuming that there's something real here, and there does seem to be something, eventually all that will smooth out and late adopters who decide want to use the tools will be able onboard themselves plenty fast. The whole vision of them is to make the work easier, more accessible, and more productive, after all. Having a big learning curve doesn't align with that vision. Unless they happen to make you more significantly productive today on the tasks you want to pursue, which only seems to be true for select people, there's no particular reason to be an early adopter.

ToucanLoucan 11mo ago

I technically use it for programming, though really for two broad things: * Sorting. I have never been able to get my head around sorting arrays, especially in the Swift syntax. Generating them is awesome. * Extensions/Categories in Swift/Objective C. "Write me an extension to the String class that will accept an array of Int8s as an argument, and include safety checks." Beautiful. That said I don't know why you'd use it for anything more. Sometimes I'll have it generate like, the skeleton of something I'm working on, a view controller with X number of outlets of Y type, with so and so functions stubbed in, but even that's going down because as I build I realize my initial idea can be improved.

malkia 11mo ago
I've been using LLMs as calculators for words, like they can summarize, spot, correct, but often can be wrong about this - especially when I have to touch language I haven't used in a while (Python, Powershell, Rust as recent examples), or sub-system (SuperPrefetch on WIndows, Or why audio is dropping on coworker's machines when they run some of the tools, and like this... don't ask me why), and all kinds of obscure subjects (where I'm sure experts exists, but when you need them they are not easy (as in "nearby") to reach for, and even then might not help) But now my grain of salt has increased - it's still helpful, but much like a real calculator - there is limit (in precision), and what it can do. For one it still can't make good jokes :) (my litmus test)

redwood 11mo ago

I liken it to a drug that feels good over the near term but has longer term impacts.. sometimes you have to get things out of your system. It's fun while it lasts and then the novelty wears off. (And just as some people have the tolerance to do drugs for much longer periods of time than others, I think the same is the case for AI)

smt88 11mo ago

No one uses agents. They're a myth that Marc Benioff willed into existence. No one who regularly uses LLMs would ever trust one to do unattended work.

Ferret7446 11mo ago
You managed to move the goalposts in two sentences; if you realized that your first claim is wrong you probably should have rewrote it rather than try to save it at the end.
- chasing0entropy 11mo ago
  Agent = agentic LLM LLM = co-pilot, Gemini, Claude, Mistral chat No one who uses an LLM would trust an agentic LLM
- smt88 11mo ago
  You seem to be using a different definition of "agent(ic)" than me and perhaps most people, because your comment makes no sense. I will repeat that no organization has adopted LLMs to work independently as agents, doing work in the background without human supervision. Writing code doesn't could because the code is reviewed and easily reverted. Sending emails, writing and sending legal contracts, etc. would count.

fpauser 11mo ago

This is also my experience with (so called) AI. Coding with AI feels like working with a dumb colleague that constantly forgets. It feels so much better to manually write code.

dinvlad 11mo ago

This is the best take

raincole 11mo ago

> Typewriters and printing presses take away some, but your robot would deprive us of all. Your robot takes over the galleys. Soon it, or other robots, would take over the original writing, the searching of the sources, the checking and crosschecking of passages, perhaps even the deduction of conclusions. What would that leave the scholar? One thing only, the barren decisions concerning what orders to give the robot next! From Issac Asimov. Something I have been contemplating a lot lately.

ryandv 11mo ago

I commend you for your choices. This is the way in the 2020s.

stuaxo 11mo ago

I use it for a lot of stuff, but ultimately redo almost all of it - which I think is right. The LLM is the mush of everyone's stuff like the juice at the bottom of the bin is a mix of all the restaurants food. The writing out the other end of the LLM is bland. What it IS useful for is seeing a wrong thing and then going and making my own. I still use it for various little scripts and menial tasks. The push for this stuff to replace creativity is disgusting. Sticking LLMs in every place is just crap, I've had enough.

senko 11mo ago

It sounds like you went in deep for a while, and then rebounded. Good for you (no sarcasm, I mean it). We should all find little joys in our life and avoid things that deaden us. If AI is that for you, I'd say you made a good decision.