Comment by threetonesun
13 hours ago
I’d love it if for once someone on here saying LLMs are some life changing apparatus would give a single example.
13 hours ago
I’d love it if for once someone on here saying LLMs are some life changing apparatus would give a single example.
I can give some recent examples.
- Significantly increased my productivity as a software engineer.
- Using it daily for Chinese-English translation. Significantly better than pre-LLM translation software. Also, great at teaching grammar, nuances, etc.
- General Q&A. Like "Googling" but much faster. This is probably the most common use case for me.
> - Significantly increased my productivity as a software engineer.
This is exactly the point that keeps coming up that folks are struggling to grasp, myself included. How are you measuring this? It certainly makes me feel productive, but I'm not sure I can confidently say it has actually made me more productive. It's made the easy stuff a no-brainer (e.g. boilerplate, simple logic) and the moderate stuff really hard. Never mind the hard stuff. Vetting the code has become a whole other job on its own. The only folks I've found who confidently claim it increases productivity appear to be online (and without evidence), because no one in person is willing to claim that and show it.
> It's made the easy stuff a no-brainer (e.g. boilerplate, simple logic) and the moderate stuff really hard. Never mind the hard stuff. Vetting the code has become a whole other job on its own.
Not everyone has the same requirements, skills, usage patterns, and outcomes. It's that simple.
I can agree with the skeptics that LLM generated code is usually crap. I rarely accept its output without significant edits unless it's truly boilerplate, and I want to avoid the need for that kind of code in the first place.
For me, the killer use case is debugging. I hate wasting time debugging something that should work except for mistakes, and now I do that probably 75% less than I used to because AI does it for me.
I don't know if it makes me that much more productive, but I certainly enjoy my work more not having to do as much tedious debugging, and it feels like I waste a lot less time doing it.
I'll share my experience.
I've never been a developer. Dabbled in frontend web for a bit (HTML/CSS/JS, no large frameworks) and felt like if I really dedicated some time to learning how to code, I'd be pretty decent at it. It's always intrigued me, and I've always had an itch to build things, but just never found the time. I'm in marketing now - I own an agency.
Over the last 6 months since the coding models really began to step up and get good, I've built several dedicated apps to support my business:
-Profitability optimizer and forecaster based on unit economics and current ad efficiency.
-Creative strategy tool that ingests brand and product data and helps explore primary and secondary personas and emotional motivators.
-Reporting tool that processes natural language queries and connects to multiple data sources to fetch results. Can schedule reports to post directly to Slack or email.
All robust and hosted on Railway. Team members can use them. Clients can use them. OAuth via Google.
Would any of this have been possible for me before the rise of frontier LLMs? Absolutely not. Learning the frameworks alone would have taken me longer than it's taken to just... build. Rapidly build and deploy. Total game changer for me.
Oh - and I'm building a game on the side. LLMs know Godot.
> How are you measuring this?
I attempt a programming task with and without LLM assistance. The attempt with LLM assistance is pretty much always completed faster and cleaner.
Another example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43991777
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> Significantly increased my productivity as a software engineer.
You’re going to have to define productivity as it applies to software engineering. With LLMs we’ve primarily seen the number of PRs over time being discussed as a proxy for LoC, as well as the speed of bootstrapping a small project. None of these have a known correlation with economic output. They just feel good, to the programmer, their manager, or both.
> Using it daily for Chinese-English translation. Significantly better than pre-LLM translation software. Also, great at teaching grammar, nuances, etc.
Yes dealing with language is the one area LLMs are actually designed for. But what’s the TAM for machine translation?
> General Q&A. Like "Googling" but much faster. This is probably the most common use case for me.
And now you’re missing any kind of traceability for the information that you “learn,” since it all gets spaghettified and then recombined into a pile of plausible slop with no attribution. Where before you had to do slightly more work to find the information you needed, now it’s available faster but you’re at complete mercy of literally 3 American companies plus the CCP for the accuracy of that information. Most people somehow seem happy with this arrangement.
> You’re going to have to define productivity as it applies to software engineering.
I meant it in a colloquial way. I just get more done, faster.
> And now you’re missing any kind of traceability for the information
Modern LLM assistants provide sources and references. While it can sometimes be just "slightly faster", it can genuinely save hours of research on complex ones. Also the "slightly faster" can add up to hours saved with frequent use.
My wife was diagnosed with several chronic conditions in the last year. AI tools both diagnosed her before a doctor did (which helped us find the right docs to care for her by figuring out what to look for). One of her conditions (Mast Cell Activation Syndrome) comes with a ton of dietary restrictions. Its helped us immensely in planning meals and identifing food triggers. All of this would have possible with out AI as a tool but would have led to much more pain and suffering and likely taken much longer to figure it out. It's easy to dismiss (especially given the hallucinations) but it's been legitimatly life changing over the last year
We have some exotic chicks the kids picked out, and 4 were going to die of brooder pneumonia.
An LLM correctly diagnosed it, and figure out that we could treat them with Nutri-drench Sheep Supplement, since Tractor Supply was sold out of the chicken version, and they are very similar.
Of course it then immediately recommended we use hemp bedding that would kill them a different way, but the saleswoman sanity checked all of the above,
100% survival rate.
Everyone’s thriving. Chickens would follow the medical advice again, I guess.
Sounds like you have only the saleswoman to thank, not the bot.
I used Gemini to fix my new boiler by taking various photos and asking it for help. It saved me a plumber call-out (this was a user error issue, nothing safety critical).
Gemini also told me about some obscure procedures to fix my wedding paperwork after it’d been submitted with typos.
> - Significantly increased my productivity as a software engineer
I don't understand this. It increased productivity of every developer in the western world, so it didn't really give you an advantage. Your output is more valuable, but your colleagues' output is more valuable too, and your competitors' output too, and so on. So you're doing more things at the same salary and it's not like your company or your employer is making more money than usual or awarding you more eoy bonus. If your "life-change" is "I'm writing more code" without any other advantage (and with the possible disadvantage of your role changing, or being at risk), why is it desirable?
Intrinsic motivation. I find developing software inherently enjoyable, and being able to build things faster with less friction simply makes me happy.
From experience, whenever someone asks in that particular tone and is actually provided with examples, they proceed to bend over backwards to "prove" that it's secretly not much of an improvement at all/AI psychosis/a mirage/actually harmful/<insert other substitute for "I don't like it therefore you must be wrong" reason here>.
I asked - I don't have an opinion either way. I use LLMs, I just don't find them life changing, but I would never deny that in a world with infinite data something that can do a pretty good first pass at parsing and summarizing and organizing it with little effort on the creation end is a good thing.
Some guy vibe coded a tasks app client that I really like. Not life changing but I couldn't find one that suited my needs since de-iPhoning before this one.
Does it have to be an LLM? https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/ai-skin-cancer-nhs...
It does have to be an LLM; when people talk about AI these days, they're talking about LLMs; that's the common framing of the discussion. Linking to unrelated ML to argue that AI has benefits is disingenuous.
Immediate medical and childcare advice from LLM are pretty life changing.
Interpreting reports, avoiding drug interactions, or knowing when to seek medical care. And before people object- I can literally use the same LLM my doctor does to check these things, without waiting 2 weeks for an appointment.
I helped my parents work through bacterial culture results when my dad was hospitalized with sepsis, and had them ask their doctor for specific follow up tests.
I rebuilt my gas furnace and fixed my dishwasher with AI as an assistant.
Those aren't the fun parts tho. My favorite is touring art museums ancient historical sites with an LLM guide. It can give me a short academic essay about every artist, painting, or artifact. It can pull out details quirky stories about the history that I specifically would find interesting.
I cant recommend this enough. Its like visiting with a 10 PhD docents in art history.
How do you know it is not hallucinating those quirky stories :)?
How do you trust a book, blog, tour guide, or art history teacher?
How do you trust the placards under a piece of art?
The short answer is you accept that it isn't perfect and move on with life. I have found multiple errors in all of those things. Human tour guides are especially the worst at making things up.
Part of navigating life is dealing with imperfect information and uncertainty.
Just like with a friend, coworker, or spouse, you use your judgment and track records to decide when to trust what is being said based on subject matter and stakes.
Domain matters. I have found it good at history, but less trustworthy in others. For examle, the llm gave me a bunch of bogus advice as I repaired my dishwasher based on weather models that weren't accurate. There is also a lot of bad information on Reddit and Appliance blogs. Repairman are almost as bad as the tour guides, willing to lie straight to your face. I deal with it the same way.
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Try the prompt to opus 4.8:
does "das man" know they are part of the crowd?
https://www.the-scientist.com/chatgpt-and-alphafold-help-des...
Literally saved his dog's life.