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Comment by bigstrat2003 | Hacker News Reader

bigstrat2003

> And LLM's already have tons of productive uses.

I disagree strongly with that. Right now they are fun toys to play with, but not useful tools, because they are not reliable. If and when that gets fixed, maybe they will have productive uses. But for right now, not so much.

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Who do you speak for? Other people have gotten value from them. Maybe you meant to say “in my experience” or something like that. To me, your comment reads as you making a definitive judgment on their usefulness for everyone.

I use it most days when coding. Not all the time, but I’ve gotten a lot of value out of them.

And yes I'm quite aware of their pitfalls.

This is a classic fallacy - you can't find a productive use for it, therefore nobody can find a productive use for it. That's not how the world works.

They are pretty useful tools. Do yourself a favor and get a $100 free trial for Claude, hook it up to Aider, and give it a shot.

It makes mistakes, it gets things wrong, and it still saves a bunch of time. A 10 minute refactoring turns into 30 seconds of making a request, 15 seconds of waiting, and a minute of reviewing and fixing up the output. It can give you decent insights into potential problems and error messages. The more precise your instructions, the better they perform.

Being unreliable isn't being useless. It's like a very fast, very cheap intern. If you are good at code review and know exactly what change you want to make ahead of time, that can save you a ton of time without needing to be perfect.

> a $100 free trial

What?

A free trial of an amount of credits that would otherwise cost $100, I'm assuming.

Could be. Does such a thing exist?

Not outwardly/visibly/readily from a quick scan of their site and a short list of search results.

I misremembered, because I was checking out all the various trials available. I think I was thinking of Google Cloud's $300 in credits, since I'm using Claude through their VertexAI.

Can't speak for the parent commentator ofc, but I suspect he meant "broadly useful"

Programmers and the like are a large portion of LLM users and boosters; very few will deny usefulness in that/those domains at this point.

Ironically enough, I'll bet the broadest exposure to LLMs the masses have is something like MIcrosoft shoehorning copilot-branded stuff into otherwise usable products and users clicking around it or groaning when they're accosted by a pop-up for it.

> A 10 minute refactoring

That's when you learn Vim, Emacs, and/or grep, because I'm assuming that's mostly variable renaming and a few function signature changes. I can't see anything more complicated, that I'd trust an LLM with.

I'm a Helix user, and used Vim for over 10 years beforehand. I'm no stranger to macros, multiple cursors, codebase-wide sed, etc. I still use those when possible, because they're easier, cheaper, and faster. Some refactors are simply faster and easier with an LLM, though, because the LSP doesn't have a function for it, and it's a pattern that the LLM can handle but doesn't exactly match in each invocation. And you shouldn't ever trust the LLM. You have to review all its changes each time.

OP should really save their money. Cursor has a pretty generous free trail and is far from the holy grail.

I recently (in the last month) gave it a shot. I would say once in the maybe 30 or 40 times I used it did it save me any time. The one time it did I had each line filled in with pseudo code describing exactly what it should do… I just didn’t want to look up the APIs

I am glad it is saving you time but it’s far from a given. For some people and some projects, intern level work is unacceptable. For some people, managing is a waste of time.

You’re basically introducing the mythical man month on steroids as soon as you start using these

> I am glad it is saving you time but it’s far from a given.

This is no less true of statements made to the contrary. Yet they are stated strongly as if they are fact and apply to anyone beyond the user making them.

Usefulness is subjective.

Ah to clarify I was not saying one shouldn’t try it at all — I was saying the free trail is plenty enough to see if it would be worth it to you.

I read the original comment as “pay $100 and just go for it!” which didn’t seem like the right way to do it. Other comments seem to indicate there are $100 dollars worth of credits that are claimable perhaps

One can evaluate LLMs sufficiently with the free trails that abound :) and indeed one may find them worth it to themselves. I don’t disparage anyone who signs up for the plans

Ah, my apologies. That makes perfect sense. You are entirely correct, there is no reason to commit to such a spend for evaluation.

Hello? Do you have a pulse? LLMs accomplish like 90% of everything I do now so I don’t have to do it…

Explain what this code syntax means…

Explain what this function does…

Write a function to do X…

Respond to my teammates in a Jira ticket explaining why it’s a bad idea to create a repo for every dockerfile…

My teammate responded with X write a rebuttal…

… and the list goes on … like forever

It’s not that the LLM is doing something productive, it’s that you were doing things that were unproductive in the first place, and it’s sad that we live in a society where such things are considered productive (because of course they create monetary value).

As an aside, I sincerely hope our “human” conversations don’t devolve into agents talking to each other. It’s just an insult to humanity.

Exactly what management wants to hear so they can lay off hundreds and push salaries down.

I use LLMs everyday to proofread and edit my emails. They’re incredible at it, as good as anyone I’ve ever met. Tasks that involve language and not facts tend to be done well by LLMs.

> I use LLMs everyday to proofread and edit my emails.

This right here. I used to spend tons of time making sure my emails were perfect. Is it professional enough, am I being too terse, etc…

The first profitable AI product I ever heard about (2 years ago) was an exec using a product to draft emails for them, for exactly the reasons you mention.

"it only needs to be good enough" there are tons of productive uses for them. Reliable, much less. But productive? Tons

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