Ask HN: What AI tools changed your work/life? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What AI tools changed your work/life?

22 pointsdivan23 comments

New shiny AI tools and apps appear daily. Many of them are trash, but some are gems, and can change work or life drastically.

Big players/LLMs aside (ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney, Github Copilot, etc), what tool you found that stands out and really nails the prolem it supposed to help with. Could be very niche tool. Share as many as you wish.

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My list:

- Goodtape (audio transcription made right)

- Wondershare Dynamics (AI MoCap from single video, using for sports analysis)

- On1 Pro Raw / Davinci Resolve AI features (game changers for my photo/video editing)

- ComfyUI/Comflowy (for image generation pipelines)

- Windsurf Editor (brand new, but gosh this is magic)

Do you have any screen recordings of Windsurf in action?

no, working on private projects mostly, but there should be plenty on Youtube.

They nailed agentic part and costs of indexing/searching/chunking large repositories. This thing searches 2000+ files in like few seconds and as I understand it's really hard to hit the limits of Pro version.

And I'm so impressed how attentive it is to the process - like searching for examples of code usage in other files, or double checking itself. Once I told it that code doesn't produce the right result, and it checked everything and then concluded that it's most likely my judgement mistake and asked to open DevTools and copy request payload, so it can verify my claim :) (and it was right – was my mistake).

Cursor is a toy compared to this.

"Cursor is a toy compared to this." Now I am intrigued even more... happy Holidays.

https://vetted.ai/ as a shopping assistant.

I'm a Maths Undergrad, it blows me when I use chatgpt, it helps me to understand theorems, I used to struggle to understand. I can immediately ask my query, I would say 8 out of 10 times, it's response was very helpful to me. Also it's not that I completely rely on it, I also do Google, but only if I want in more depth.

I also wanted to use other alternatives too, but I have gave up. They are like wastage of time for me now.

Chatgpt free version is far superior than Gemini free version.

Claude free version is too limited, else it matches Chatgpt.

I’m extremely curious to hear more about your experiences with this! Is it a matter of providing working examples to understand the boundaries of different theorems?

I would say, how it has helped me is :

My prof's teaching is not that good, he skips several things (not basic) while teaching & when I refer textbook, I don't get it.

Theorem consists of several statements, conditions, and understanding of those things where & why they are required, what happens without those conditions?

To understand theorems, I never asked it for providing examples. But I asked it to prove some difficult exercises from textbook and it was able to do it. In my experience, all this improves my learning.

Also sometimes for problem solving, I want to know, what are different techniques to solve that problem. And it does very good job.

I've never asked it to do basic additions or calculation, because I have heard from others, it does calculation wrong.

Some times it couldn't answer average question. But for my use case, I find it extremely beneficial.

> it blows me when I use chatgpt

New beta program?

Is it sarcasm? Due to mistake in my comment "blows me" ?

No just a fun typo I wanted to point out

In guessing English isn’t your primary language based on the wording in the above comment. Hopefully this is a helpful FYI:

“Blows me” is a sexual euphemism for someone getting their dick sucked.

“Blows my mind” means your head exploded because something was too awesome.

Thanks for pointing out. Yes, english is not my first language.

When I was reviewing my comment. I also found my comment missing something in it.

But honestly I really didn't know that "blows me" was something different.

"blows me away" would work as well

Claude and Cursor made me realise I didn't need to hire anyone on Fiverr or any senior software engineers at all for my business, it has changed my business and I don't need to work much on it, it pretty much runs itself.

I only provide internships for junior engineers for 3 months max to at least give them experience working in a company.

But in the long run, senior or junior, there will definately be less jobs for engineers in the future, I don't even think FAANG jobs are safe really.

What business do you run currently?

Cline and Claude for coding

ChatGPT 4o for improving technical writing

NotebookLM for freaking out my friends when I generate podcasts from their bios and tell them they've been featured on NPR.

People who said Perplexity, or even lurkers who use it: Are you subscribing to Pro or just using the Free tier?

Being unwilling to pay another $20/month for yet another AI, I've been resistant to trying it, assuming the Free tier is probably not that good or severely rate-limited.

Transcription is pretty huge. I should start paying for read.ai I’ve often said, oh it’s in the transcript only to find I hadn’t done the needful and the transcript wasn’t present for some reason (usually user error)

Ollama and Perplexity.

I can do limitless experiments of all kinds with different LLModels locally on my machine, thanks to Ollama.

Perplixity is the product that replaced Google for me. It's fast, crisp, and reliable.

ChatGPT is very useful as it is, haven’t felt the need to explore alternatives.

ChatGPT but not for the good

It's made me very lazy with my thinking and writing.

This is the bigger reality. It’s turned almost all business and academic writing into long-winded meaningless trash. Well, more than it already was I guess. It seems that the way people use it is to expand few bits of information into many bits of content to convince others that work was done. It’s like the Turing test for laziness. The other issue is that it tends toward agreement on anything it wasn’t trained to specifically disagree about. I can see a smarter and more disagreeable bot doing much worse on LMSys than the sycophant models. Nothing new there I guess. But it’s spilling over to human norms as well, in that previously normal human deviation from chat model style interactions is anomalous, so everybody has to use the AI, and therefore nobody is providing any more value than the LLM, so everybody is getting laid off, except the disagreeable guy, and he gets fired first. It’s hacking us in the positive reinforcement vulnerabilities, ones that get worse the more they’re exploited, but it has none of the human resource constraints that previously kept them in check.

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