Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Great thoughts. I too came back from vacation this year to find that I wasn't nearly as interested in AI doing certain things for me (like writing) and much more interested in finding the areas it's properly good at.
At the moment I'm getting most value out of: - Checking integrity of data through custom scripting - Controlling my smart home stuff via quick commands - Reconciling account software with my bank and uploaded / emails receipts - Researching info across disparate sources - Managing pipelines of work (eg sales cycles or content schedules) reminding me when I need to do something - Parsing interesting articles / videos and pulling out the essentials - Reworking text I've written to work across multiple social accounts - Asking me great questions about whether I'm on track with what I said I wanted to do - Pinging me when an email looks important so I don't have to continually check it. - Coding on projects that I want to make rapid progress on for work (not tinkering)
This list is quite different to the one I'd have written a year ago - that would have mostly been about writing, information retrieval and coding.
The most obvious use cases are I think the least useful ones. Diffusion of AI will take time!
by chrismdp - Yes. This is consistent w/ my default position: "if LLMs are good at it, we probably don't need to do it."
- There are tasks where AI genuinely removes tedious work and then there are tasks where the tedious or uncomfortable part is actually the thinking you needed to doby veunes
- I find that it lets me do a surprising amount of work before the excitement and hyperfocus wear off. This is sometimes good, sometimes bad.
Sometimes I'll get a neat little feature out while I feel inspired. This is great for doing something cool on a Sunday afternoon when priorities don't matter.
Sometimes I'll start something bigger and get halfway there, then I realise it's not what I should be doing, and it becomes another open tab that does not fit in my list of priorities.
Success depends on focus and saying no to most things. AI makes it easy to say yes to everything. Instead of making my todo list shorter, it just makes me add more stuff to it. It allows me to act on impulses instead of thinking carefully.
by nicbou - I'm cautious on the dependency part too. Do I have a bunch of tools now that help me and wouldn't exist without an agent writing them for me? Sure. Will I be able to fix them once their codebase will eventually need maintenance? Most likely not. So I'll better still have access to some decent model then!
Also, especially in work, it undermines skills and experience you then just lack. That also will only be fine as long as you are doing the work somewhere where they provide/allow use of LLMs.
by _def - I like this, and resonate with the same thoughts. I do wonder when it comes to work though if the answer isn’t doing less but maybe breaking through in some way. I don’t know what it looks like but I do have the feeling LLMs are here to stay.
Or maybe it’s just keeping them in the work box - if someone wants to pay me to use LLMs and generate code, so be it. But keeping them away from hobbies, plans, art. Noble maybe, but then again there are a lot of projects I’m unlikely to do if I can’t find some way to make the level of effort required fit in with my lifestyle. With young kids, side project time is so incredibly limited.
Sometimes I feel like the main thing I’m learning from the AI wave is how modern life has a way of becoming more frustrating as more technology enters the picture. There’s all sorts of good in it, sure. But I do feel like so many more people are disgruntled by new tech compared to years past. I don’t think our cave man dopaminergic system is well suited for dealing with the expectations or availability of modern productivity and information.
by appplication - I find it interesting that so many of my friends resonate with this. I… don’t, really.
I only ever have 2-4 opencode/claude tabs open at once. And I use them for consistent tasks. There’s no way I’d be able to keep track otherwise. I have an “email reviewer” terminal, and a “doc maker” terminal, and 1-2 “coding” terminals.
But I don’t start a half dozen things simultaneously (which is ironic, because I have ADHD). I don’t feel the need to maximize my efficiency with AI. I also don’t lament the ideas / things I start but don’t finish; that has been my life, lol - see the aforementioned ADHD. So why should I start caring about my half-finished projects now, just because I sunk some tokens into them?
I spent an entire day the other day trying to use an LLM to help me automate something manual and tedious, and it was a failure. Did nothing but waste time in the end. Perhaps it’s those experiences (of which I’ve had plenty) that help me realize the limitations?
I don’t feel like it should make me more productive; it does, because I can offload random tasks that I do not have to be the one to do (“find the function where this happens” or “find all the laundromats in the cities I’m going to”) but I use it for research like that, and not so much “do my taxes for me.”
That’s why I paid a guy to do my taxes. I don’t feel this “need” for sending everything into AI. And just because I can use it to do anything myself… why should I?
There are two caveats:
1) when I’m directly working on something, I don’t want to leave it. I’m hyperfocused on it. But that’s true even without AI; I would have been obsessed with building doughflow.app were it for AI or not. The difference is I may never have finished it without AI.
2) I find myself using it as a crutch sometimes for simple things like sending a message to a colleague. I don’t like that, and have been trying to avoid it. I’ve spent all my life writing naturally, and I don’t need someone to proofread my chats. That’s a habit I am tossing, in general.
Perhaps it is the ADHD that actually helps me focus; that is, perhaps the coping mechanisms built for managing my countless disparate thoughts also work for managing multiple disparate agents? Just thinking out loud.
by borski - I am coming around to the view that for somethings it is better to not use AI at all. Writing and Strategic thought are those things for me.
The problem with writing, and something I am noticing lately, is that AI robs your ability to create prose in your style. Even if you use AI just a little bit to touch up your writing - you start being influenced - And over time it adds up - you start writing like AI just a little bit every now and then. It seems to be robbing me of my ability to create original prose.
Strategic thought is the other thing - like if I am deciding what we, as a company should focus on long term, it is easy for LLM's to give you a wrong direction. I think this is more because Strategic directions require a ton of context - and it is almost impossible for you to feed the ai EVERYTHING. There might be some things which are easy to miss out, which might make all the difference, and the LLM would assume that the 'requirements' are complete and would go to town with it. I suspect, this is largely because the current SOTA LLM's are being optimised for code and there isnt enough data in the training set for them to learn long term thought.
Coding is I think fine for me. But even there, I dont let the agent use memory at all. I create the context - and it runs from that only. The biggest unlock here is that I can now program in any language. And it frees up sometime to think in systems and come up with more robust architectures.
by sonink