Comment by throw4847285
4 hours ago
Nothing I could make would be very good. So the only reason I would, say, write, is in order to write, not to have produced an essay. Hobbies are ways to pass time productively. If it took less time, it wouldn't be a better use of time, but a worse one.
It's not about being able to do more faster, but be able to faster get help doing what you wanted to do. For example, before LLMs, if I wanted to figure out how to do something with a specific analog synth I basically spent time reading manuals and browsing internet forums, piecing together whatever I could find into something actionable, sometimes slightly wrong, but at least in the right direction.
Nowadays, I fire off the LLM to figure it out for me, then try out what I get back, and I can move on to actually having fun playing on the synth, rather than trying to figure out how to do what I wanted to do.
The end goal for me with my hobbies is more or less the same, have fun. But for me the fun is not digging through manuals, it is to "do" or "use" or "perform" or whatever. I like music production because I like to make music, not because I like digging through manuals for some arcane knowledge.
But looking up information via an LLM is an entirely different category of usage. I have no problem with that (well, much less of a problem).
The point is "things that used to take me hours, can now be done by a magic computer program in the background, while I do other things". It's applicable for small unix utilities I create to make my development UX better, it's applicable for when I'm doing music production and it's applicable in a wide-range of tasks both professionally and for my hobbies.
It saves me from stuff I find boring yet necessary, so I can focus more on the fun stuff. I guess this was the overall point I was trying to make in this comment-chain.