58 comments? Meh I will put this in LLM and have it summarise it in bullet points.

• When I’m stuck in debugging and can’t think of what can go wrong, LLM chats are quite useful. I can ask for possibilities and often I find something meaningful that didn’t come to mind. These kind of things are hard to do with search engines. (If I’m debugging something unfamiliar this becomes very counterproductive though, as I can’t filter hallucinations by looking).
• A smart text formatter
• Simple bash one liner, boilerplate code generation. I tried it but non trivial/bit longer code generation again gets effectively slower as I find myself fixing/working around AI mistake quite often.

I’m a radiologist and our group uses an LLM tool to assist with generating reports on imaging studies. Our reports have a body that includes all of the imaging findings (which we dictate) and then a conclusion/summary calling out what is most important (and serving as a tl;dr for other physicians). The LLM tool analyzes the body to generate that summary of important findings. It certainly is not perfect and frequently requires some editing. Overall it is faster than me creating the summary each time though.

I think ChatGPT and other Ai can be a fantastic tool if you use it responsibly. It’s a great help for learning and practicing things. I’ve very recently made my first server and it’s great at answering all my simple questions that I sometimes feel hesitant to bother people with, and little things like that. Sometimes I’ll ask it to give me a simple kind of structure or bullet point list of topics I need to make sure to hit in my writing, or weirdly enough it’s pretty good at helping me with substitutions in recipes, or other little things like that. And I personally think that all of this is fine.

But I’m entirely against using it to create any kind of final product. Having it do any kind of actual final work is just stupid and lazy. I truly don’t think Ai is capable of making anything that’s worth peoples time really, and in the amount of time you’ll spend meticulously explaining everything that you want or need for whatever it is you have it generating for you, you could’ve just made it yourself and done a far better job. That’s where I draw the line. I don’t think Ai has to be inherently evil or anything because it can be a great tool, but you can’t rely on it to actually do things for you. Maybe others will disagree me I know many people especially in Fediverse circles are very very strongly anti Ai in all facets but that’s just my thoughts.

Much as I dislike praising AI, I must admit I got some good results using an AI powered search engine for academic articles to find sources for a term paper I’m writing for a seminar class I’m taking for my masters degree.

I don’t use AI for productive work, for the same reasons I don’t stir my soup with a dishrag.

Pretty good for recipes, tho’.

Pretty useful for software engineering, particularly helpful in writing a test suite, you still need to actually check the output though ofc

Also made use of it for writing my end of year review to solve the blank page problem, I find it a lot easier to edit down than starting HR stuff like that entirely from scratch

I basically use it on rare rare occasion to help get me “unstuck” with creative tasks, I don’t really use what it produces in the end, I wind up dismantling it entirely and rewriting it “properly” but it has a use you know?

I have used it as a nicer version of web search, mostly for “How do I write code using this library I’m not yet familiar with?” It provides passable tutorials when the library’s documentation is sparse (I get it) or poorly written (they tried 🤷‍♂️).

I used AI to generate random fake data to use in training on Excel , also to understand various concepts in my feild of study and to answer my sudden random questions

Its great for reading docs, I don’t have to search through to find out how to get a user’s playlists using the Spotify api

I have been this week, for the first time.

I’m using Hugo to design a new website and Gemini has been useful in find the actual useful documentation that I need. Much faster and more accurate than trawling the official pages, and does a better job of providing relevent examples. It’s also really good at sensing what I’m actually asking, even if I’m clumsy at the phrasing.

And for those who continue to say AI isn’t really useful for learning - another thing I’ve been using it for. “write perl to convert a string to only container lowercase, converting any non-alpha chars to dashes” - I’ve learned how to do stuff like that over and over again, but the exact syntax falls out of my head after a few months of not doing it. AI is good at providing a quick recollect. I’ve already learned perl properly (including from paper books - yes, I first wrote perl a quarter of a century ago) - and forgotten it so many times. AI doesn’t prevent me learning, just makes it faster.

I use it to outline and layout big documents and reports. I give it a list of tasks I did and it writes the long-form text in the approved style. I use it anytime I need to translate my thoughts or process into corporate jargon. And occasionally my bosses ask me for a report on something totally unrelated to what we are doing and I’ll ask GPT to do the first pass on the topic and then come I’ll back and re-write it iteratively as I figure out what part of the topic the boss really cares about.

Messed around for a while and then nothing. Not sure if I’m being AI-averse but i really can’t find good use for it.

I use it in two ways.

ChatGPT as an interactive search. Last one was about EU GDPR compliance checklist to give a quick answer on what areas need to be looked at. I use it like once a week for work.

Productive in othen ways I use it once a month for recipes. Recipes are probably my favourite since I can say “Write it using grams and ml” and "give me some options to replace eggs and it writes out a legit recipe based on these millions of annoying blogs recipes.

Jetbrains AI auto complete for programming which is getting better slowly and I’m getting the hang of using it. It’s really good for cases where I have a common thing that I don’t remember the syntax of and I just type a name of a variable like “cspHeaderValue” and it will format thing that’s very annoying to look up based on what I some values I wrote above.

I’m not a 10x engineer now for it, it’s more like +10% overall and really depends on the task. I can see it go up to around +50% but an AI plateau might come before then.