Comment by colingauvin
1 day ago
I'm a structural biologist at a mid-sized biotech. I use AI tools daily. They make accomplishing the same things I was able to accomplish before quite a lot faster and easier. They don't help me magically accomplish new things that I couldn't previously.
For example, it helps me install academic software, debug things. It helps me take a large dataset and write scripts to ask questions. It helps me go through experiment drafts to see if I'm missing things. It helps me remember obscure formulas I use every 6 months. It has not, at least in my experience, come up with anything truly novel.
A concrete example: AlphaFold is great...to come up with a starting model for a chimeric fusion or something. What would have taken me 1-2 hours fumbling around in PDB or CIF files is now a quick prompt.
Serious question - have you tried applying AI tools to more of your job, and in a goal-seeking fashion? Have you hit roadblocks?
Yes, and it's relatively good for on-rails data collection and data processing pipelines that would have previously needed occasional human intervention. Especially now that I can run something like DeepSeek v4 Flash on a couple of RTX 6000s and just script an API to hammer away without having to worry about racking up a huge bill.
> For example, it helps... debug things... and write scripts to ask questions.
Im guessing this isnt code that needs to "scale", that needs to "be elegant", that you arent focused on maintainability for the next decade. That its built for purpose and left behind.
Its all the code that for a programer would normally be in this matrix https://xkcd.com/1205/ (is it worth your time) -
Yeah, for someone like me in a lot of ways it's a dream come true. I have domain expertise in my field, I have a ton of computer knowledge due to building HPC clusters and working in Linux every day for years, I have lots of problems computers can solve, but no formal programming expertise. Before, muddling through Python or fixing segfaults in academic software would have been days to weeks. Now it's minutes.
I think that (understandably) HN is full of professional programmers for whom code is the product, and so LLMs are often viewed through that lens. But for someone like me, a drug is the product, not code. One off vibe coded slop is both fine, and often an upgrade over the academic software I was using.
For instance, last week I took a piece of software that decompresses a TIFF file and multithreaded it for an almost 4x speedup. I'd always known it was single threaded and it irked me because I could see my pipelines waiting for it to catch up, but I never had the expertise in C++ to go fix it. Claude did it in 30 minutes and I didn't even have to go through the hassle of compiling it again - it did that too.
What I don't know is, if someone wasn't in the trenches for a decade learning how computers work, would the results be as good?
I don’t think the results would be as good if you just prompted “make this faster” as compared to “make this multithreaded”. You had high confidence in the cause of the slow down which a non-technical person might not have.
do you feel this is the same trade off of UI builders like android studio (or msvb6). you do in minutes what you previously did in 2, 3 hours.
is it all the work? no, but it's a part that's early on and have high perceived impact.
then, as you progress, that tool actually gets in the way and a new feature that would take 2 hours, now is around 2 days.
The old expense of installing new tools means that seeing how tools actually work in practice is simply impossible. You pretty much install a tool and you accept that it is the tool.
You have to know how to ask the right questions, but I think there's constant opportunities in anything computer-driven to say "this thing is taking 3 hours and I'd like to do it more often, can I do it in 3 minutes?" And that's always been true to an extent but AI makes it way more accessible.
In some ways, but it's tough to say if that's my ADHD or not. It's far too easy to leave one branch of reasoning now and jump to another whenever progress gets difficult.
Though in some areas where I can sustain interest, AI is helping me go deeper. For instance, I've been putting myself to sleep at night by just asking it questions about expectation maximization and Bayesian statistics. This has seriously boosted my understanding of cryo-EM alignment algorithms in a way I couldn't do in grad school because there was no professor that understood enough to help me when I got stuck reading literature.
So it's a double edged sword for sure.
> In some ways, but it's tough to say if that's my ADHD or not. It's far too easy to leave one branch of reasoning now and jump to another whenever progress gets difficult.
I have a co-worker who doesnt feel like ADHD helps him because he sits down and just starts... doing work and typing. Assign him a complex task, he will just start on it. Mind blowing he does this day in and day out. an absolute machine.