If I could have something that said, "Here are some things that it looks like you're procrastinating on -- do you want me to get started on them for you?" -- that would probably be crazy useful.
https://archive.ph/20250924025805/https://www.nytimes.com/20...
The privacy implications are horrifying. But if done right, you’re taking about a kind of digital ‘executive function’ that could help a lot of kids that struggle with things like prioritization and time blindness.
> If you were expecting iOS 19 after iOS 18, you might be a little surprised to see Apple jump to iOS 26, but the new number reflects the 2025-2026 release season for the software update.
As someone with ADHD, I say: Please don't build this.
Open source transcription models are already good enough to do this, and with good context engineering, the base models might be good enough, too.
It wouldn't be trivial to implement, but I think it's possible already.
I was diagnosed with ADHD and my interpretation of that diagnoses was not "I need something to take over this functionality for me," but "I need to develop this functionality so that I can function as a better version of myself or to fight against a system which is not oriented towards human dignity but some other end."
I guess I am reluctant to replace the unique faculties of individual children with a generic faculty approved by and concordant with the requirements of the larger society. How dismal to replace the unique aspects of children's minds with a cookie cutter prosthetic meant to integrate nicely into our bullshit hell world. Very dismal.
For many people, it's easier to improve a bad first version of a piece of writing than to start from scratch. Even current mediocre LLM are great at writing bad first drafts.
Anyone is great at creating a bad first draft. You don’t need help to create something bad, that’s why that’s a common tip. Dan Harmon is constantly hammering on that advice for writer’s block: “prove you’re a bad writer”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVqYUaUO1cQ
If you get an LLM to write a first draft for you, it’ll be full of ideas which aren’t yours which will condition your writing.
Famously not so! Writer's block is real!
Getting an LLM to produce a not-so-bad first draft is just another technique.
I am seeing a pattern here. It appears that AI isn't for everyone. Not everyone's personality may be a good fit for using AI. Just like not everybody is a good candidate for being a software dev, or police officer etc.
I used to think that it is a tool. Like a car is. Everybody would want one. But that appears not be the case.
For me, I used AI every day as a tool, for work and and home tasks. It is a massive help for me.
It's hard for me to imagine many. It's not doing the dishes or watering the plants.
If I wanted to rearrange the room I could have it mock up some images, I guess...
How can you verify the recommendations are sound, valid, safe, complete, etc., without trying them out? And trying out unsound, invalid, unsafe, incomplete, etc., recommendations might result in dead plants in a couple of weeks.
I've found it immensely helpful for giving real world recommendations about things like this, that I know how to find on my own but don't have the time to do all the reading and synthesizing.
Such an odd complaint about LLMs. Did people just blindly trust Google searches before hand?
If it's something important, you verify it the same way you did anything else. Check the sources and use more than a single query. I have found the various LLMs to very useful in these cases, especially when I'm coming at something brand new and have no idea what to even search for.
Use only actionable prompts, negations don't work on ai and they don't work on people.
Hell, in the past few days I started making something to help me write documents for work (https://www.writelucid.cc) and a viewer for all my blood tests (https://github.com/skorokithakis/bt-viewer), and I don't think I would have made either without an LLM.
Would have never done that without LLMs.
I'm tackling projects solo I never would have even attempted before but I could see people getting bad results and giving up.
IOW, can you redo it by yourself? If you can't then you did not learn it.
Knowing the abstract steps and tripwires yes, but details will always have to be looked up. If just not to miss any new developments.
Well, yes it is; you can't very well claim to have learned something if you are unable to do it.
I get that point, but the original post I replied to didn't say "Hey, I know have $THING set up when I never had it before", he said "I learned to do $THING", which is a whole different assertion.
I'm not contending the assertion that he now has a thing he did not have before, I'm contending the assertion that he has learned something.
This is a truism and, I believe, is at the core of the disagreement on how useful AI tools are. Some people keep talking about outlier success. Other people are unimpressed with the performance in ordinary tasks, which seem to take longer because of back-and-forth prompting.
One thing I've noticed is that I don't have a circle of people where I can discus programming with, and having an LLM to answer questions and wireframe up code has been amazing.
My job doesn't require programming, but programming makes my job much easier, and the benefits have been great.
I want to second your experience as I’ve had the same as well. Tackling SO many more tasks than before and at such a crazy pace. I’ve started entire businesses I wouldn’t have just because of AI.
But at the same time, some people have weird blockers and just can’t use AI. I don’t know what it is about it - maybe it’s a mental block? Wrong frame of mind? It’s those same people who end up saying “I spend more time fighting the ai and refining prompts than I would on the end task”.
I’m very curious what it is that actually causes this divide.
I've been using it for almost a year now, and it's definitely improved my productivity. I've reduced work that normally takes a few hours to 20 minutes. Where I work, my manager was going to hire a junior developer and ended up getting a pro subscription to Claude instead.
I also think it will be a concern for that 50-something developer that gets laid off in the coming years, has no experience with AI, and then can't find a job because it's a requirement.
My cousin was a 53 year old developer and got laid off two years ago. He looked for a job for 6 months and then ended up becoming an auto mechanic at half the salary, when his unemployment ran out.
The problem is that he was the subject matter expert on old technology and virtually nobody uses it anymore.
Ok, so subjective
Task: Walk to the shops & buy some milk.
Deliverables: 1. Video of walking to the shops (including capturing the newspaper for that day at the local shop) 2. Reciept from local store for milk. 3. Physical bottle of Milk.
milk (noun):
1. A whitish liquid containing proteins, fats, lactose, and various vitamins and minerals that is produced by the mammary glands of all mature female mammals after they have given birth and serves as nourishment for their young.
2. The milk of cows, goats, or other animals, used as food by humans.
3. Any of various potable liquids resembling milk, such as coconut milk or soymilk.
You get what you asked for, or you didn't sufficiently define it.
There's nothing worse than a task where you can deliver one item and then have to rely on someone else to be able to deliver a second. Was once in a role where performance was judged on closing tasks; getting the burn-down chart to 0, and also having it nicely stepped. Was given a good tip to make sure each task had one deliverable and where possible—be completed independent of any other task.
Why would you write down "Buy Milk", then go buy whatever thing you call milk, then come back home and be confused about it?
Only an imbecile would get stuck in such a thing.
Could you give some examples, and an indication of your level of experience in the domains?
The statement has a much different meaning if you were a junior developer 2 years ago versus a staff engineer.
I've been adding small features in a language I don't program in using libraries I'm not familiar with thhat meet my modest functional requirements in a couple minutes each. I work with an LLM to refine my prompt, put it into cursor, run the app locally, look at the diffs, commit, push and I'm live on vercel within a minute or two.
I don't have any good metrics for productivity, so I'm 100% subjective but I can say that even if I'd been building in Rails (it's been ~4 years but I coded in it for a decade) it would have taken me at least 8 hours to have an app where I was happy with both the functionality and the look and feel so a 10x improvement in productivity for that task feels about right.
And having a "buddy" I can discuss a project with makes activation energy lower allowing me to complete more.
Also, YC videos I don't have the time to watch, I get a transcript, feed into chatGTP, ask for the key take aways I could apply to my business (it's in a project where it has context on stage, industry, maturity, business goals, key challenges, etc) so I get the benefits of 90 minutes of listening plus maybe 15 minutes of summarizing, reviewing and synthesis in typically 5-6 minutes - and it'd be quicker if I built a pipeline (something I'm vibe coding next month)
Wouldn't want to do business without it.
And have another AI review your unit tests and code. It's pretty amazing how much nuance they pick up. And just rinse and repeat until the AI can't find anything anymore (or you notice it going in circles with suggestions)
Are the frontend folks having such great results from LLMs that they're OK with "just let the LLM check for security too" for non-frontend-engineer created projects that get hosted publicly?
This. 100x this.
Personally, I think it really shines at doing the boring maintenance and tech debt work. None of these are hard or complex tasks but they all take up time and for a buck or two in tokens I can have it doing simple but tedious things while I'm working on something else.
It shines at doing the boring maintenance and tech debt work for web. My experiences with it, as a firmware dev, have been the diametric opposite of yours. The only model I've had any luck with as an agent is Sonnet 4 in reasoning mode. At an absolutely glacial pace, it will sometimes write some almost-correct unit tests. This is only valuable because I can have it to do that while I'm in a meeting or reading emails. The only reason I use it at all is because it's coming out of my company's pocket, not mine.
If you're doing JS/Python/Ruby/Java, it's probably the best at that. But even with our stack (elixir), it's not as good as, say, React/NextJS, but it's definitely good enough to implement tons of stuff for us.
And with a handful of good CLAUDE.md or rules files that guide it in the right direction, it's almost as good as React/NextJS for us.
Random Postgres stuff:
- Showed a couple of Geo/PostGIS queries that were taking up more CPU according to our metrics, asked it to make it faster, it rewrote it in away that it actually used the index. (using the <-> operator for example for proximity). One-shotted. Whole effort was about 5 mins.
- Regularly asking for maintenance scripts (like give me a script that shows me the most fragmented tables, or highest storage, etc).
CSS:
Built a whole horizontal logo marquee with CSS animations, I didn't write a single line, then I asked for little things like "have the people's avatars gently pulsate" – all this was done in about 15 mins. I would've normally spent 8-16 hours on all that pixel pushing.
Elixir App:
- I asked it to look at my GitHub actions file and make it go faster. In about 2-3 iterations, it cut my build time from 6 minutes to 2 minutes. The effort was about an hour (most of it spent waiting for builds, or fiddling with some weird syntax errors or just combining a couple extra steps, but I didn't have to spend a second doing all the research, its suggestions were spot on)
- In our repo (900 files) we had created an umbrella app (a certain kind of elixir app). I wanted to make it a non-umbrella. This one did require more work and me pushing it, but I've been putting off this task for 3 YEARS since it just didn't feel like a priority to spend 2-3 days on. I got it done in about 2 hours.
- Built a whole discussion board in about 6 hours.
- There are probably 3-6 tickets per week where I just say "implement FND-234", and it one-shots a bugfix, or implementation, especially if it's a well defined smaller ticket. For example, make this list sortable. (it knows to reuse my sortablejs hook and look at how we implemented it elsewhere).
- With the Appsignal MCP, I've had it summarize the top 5 errors in production, and write a bug fix for one I picked (I only did this once, the MCP is new). That one was one-shotted.
- Rust library (It's just an elixir binding to a rust library, the actual rust is like 20 lines, so not at all complex)... I've never coded a day of rust in my life, but all my cargo updates and occasional syntax/API deprecations, I have claude do my upgrades and fixes. I still don't know how to write any Rust.
NextJS App:
- I haven't fixed a single typescript error in probably 5 months now, I can't be bothered, CC gets it right about 99% of the time.
- Pasted in a Figma file and asked it to implement. This rarely is one-shotted. But it's still about 10x faster than me developing it manually.
The best combination is if you have a robust component library and well documented patterns. Then stuff goes even faster.
All on the $100 plan in which I've hit the limit only twice in two months. I think if they raised the price to $500, it would still feel like a no-brainer.
I think Anthropic knows this. My guess is that they're going to get us hooked on the productivity gains, and we will happily pay 5x more if they raised the prices, since the gains are that big.