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Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of humans who refuse to give that answer, too

This continues to be the most tiring response to any criticism of LLM output. It's pretty much guaranteed to show up at this point. I guess with similar enough input tokens, we're guaranteed the same output...

I don’t have to spend dozens if not hundreds of dollars a month to talk to most people in my life lol

Book an appointment with a Psychiatrist, it’ll cost more than a months cc subscription for sure

This “joke” was such low hanging fruit I went and added “most” after I initially wrote the comment in anticipation of it.

Do you have to talk to LLMs?

Another way to say the same thing: "to talk to most people in my life lol I don’t have to spend dozens if not hundreds of dollars a month"

There are lots of free LLMs, but you (often) pay for the good ones.

There's lots of people with lots of opinions, but you (often) have to pay for the good ones.

According to HN, every employer, and general social chatter, apparently yes.

Well, speaking from what I hear and see, employers want you to start using it so that you can be more productive. They've been sold this tool and want you to learn it so that your output will grow.

That's not an unfair take, I think. Again, just IME, they expect too much because the tool is oversold: it does not deliver that well. And we always hear, this new model is so much better, it's tiring.

I think we should all learn to use LLMs but we should still carefully review what they did. And that is what the employers don't quite get: the review still takes a lot of time. So, gains are not 10x but more like... 10%? Maybe 50 for boiler plate. Still gains are there, I guess.

> they expect too much because the tool is oversold: it does not deliver that well.

And unfortunately a lot of people will say it’s their reports’ fault for not properly utilizing it (even as they barely use it) because otherwise they would have to admit that they bought a tool without any plan for how to deploy it. So regardless of what is or isn’t a fair take, the results are the same. We are burdened with utilizing a thing whether it is useful or not and the results are generally not what is measured, but rather “are you using it?”

I’m just glad I work at a company that has more reasonable expectations and has been very slowly, thoughtfully rolling it out to individuals at the company and assessing what is and isn’t good for. They are interested in getting me in line, but as somebody in video production to be perfectly honest the use case for Claude is a bit tricky to navigate. We don’t write a lot of scripts and I already have bespoke software for organizing/maintaining footage that isn’t on a subscription basis. The work I’m also doing doesn’t call for these speed-editing solutions that generate tik tok chaff. All our stuff is hours long and it’s high volume. Any video-centric AI service costs an arm and a leg.

I do think it could be useful for writing some terminal scripts and such, but as far as a daily tool we are still scratching our heads and thinking about it. But it’s nice to be able to do that without somebody saying “why aren’t you using it?” every meeting.

Why are employers so incompetent to just believe and cargo cult any business trend to come along? Shouldn't they do research first before making wide, sweeping changes in work policy?

I know I'm shouting into the void, but seriously.

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