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Comment by Gagarin1917 | Hacker News Reader

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Gagarin1917

>And in coding specifically, the speedup is real and comes with its own bill.

Oh so this article isn’t really about where AI spending is actually happening.

I HOPE people aren’t spending money on AI writing emails. That’s definitely not worth it.

Companies are spending the most on coding tools, not email writing. That’s the main value proposition right now.

It also doesn’t get into media generation and industries that use video or music.

It’s just a really narrow look at probably the worst use case for AI. Useless.

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> I HOPE people aren’t spending money on AI writing emails.

They very definitely are. I'm seeing more and more front-line responses to customer support emails that are very clearly written by AI.

Here's an example from this week:

  Thank you for reaching out and providing all of those tracking and
  return details right away. I am currently checking in with our
  Returns Team to track down your package and see why there has been a
  delay in processing it since its delivery.

  As soon as I receive an update from our warehouse specialists, I
  will reach back out to you directly via this email thread with the
  status of your credit. Thank you so much for your patience in the
  meantime!

But why if that costing anyone money? You can generate like 50 of that kind of thing using various chatbots throughout your day.

You don’t need a pro account for emails.

Not that I've ever looked into it but I would have thought that the "free" chatbot AI services would prohibit commercial/business use without a paid plan. Maybe not?

No not at all

> I HOPE people aren’t spending money on AI writing emails. That’s definitely not worth it.

The engineers use the coding AI for everything they don't like to do that distracts them from doing what they like to do. So that's certainly a lot of writing emails, status updates, meeting notes, journaling, Slack messages, and prettifying slide presentations and so so so many docs.

So if you're aghast that hundreds of dollars of AI tokens per engineer per month is being spent on writing emails, you should be even more offended that the more expensive human engineer time used to be wasted on those tasks.

I use AI to shorten my emails, I write as I talk, and I ramble a lot in my head.

But surely the free version of any of the chatbots is enough to achieve that, right? You don’t need a Pro subscription for that.

It's not the only use case for LLMs I have. I use local LLMs for some things.

> Companies are spending the most on coding tools, not email writing.

They probably spend more on having LLMs just parse documents than writing emails than writing code. You maybe forget that most people are not programmers.

It doesn’t matter what “most people” are, coding agents use an obscene amount of tokens, literally millions per day. Every request to an agent needs to parse at least several different documents/files.

All LLMs use obscene tokens just programmers are more aware of it

That’s not true. The different use cases of LLMs objectively use different amounts of tokens. AI coding agents can parse half a dozen or more files on each request, plus use a ton for thinking.

Writing an email barely uses any in comparison.

> thinking

LLM doesn't think

> AI coding agents can parse half a dozen or more files on each request

yeh people never ever ask LLMs to write emails based on a number of docs and spreadsheets and other emails and Slack chats plus some websites and definitely won't iterate on it multiple times...

and parsing source code is peanuts compared to parsing a PDF

>LLM doesn't think

You don’t realize I’m referring to the process of generating a ton of text in an attempt to better address the request - a process that these LLM companies call “thinking”? Are you out of the loop or are you taking some kind of pointless stand here?

>yeh people never ever ask LLMs to write emails based on a number of docs and spreadsheets and other emails and Slack chats plus some websites and definitely won't iterate on it multiple times...

A worker might have one or two of those large requests a day. That stop doesn’t come close to agentic AI token usage. I’ve been applying for jobs daily, uploading both my resume and the job posting upwards of 6-7 times per day to these chatbots. I still never hit the free limit.

Agentic AI coding obviously uses far, far more. This really shouldn’t be surprising.

1. You seem to think that non programmers don't ask LLMs to program for them. Maybe that's why you're comfortable here thinking you're definitely will keep being in demand. Believe me they do ask an LLM to write for them various tools and bots and what LLM writes can in turn consume tokens like crazy be agentic or whatever the latest hype word is.

2. even without that uploading a resume is not "write emails based on a number of docs and spreadsheets and other emails and Slack chats plus some websites and iterate on it multiple times". one of those requests can easily be a month worth of your resume uploads at that rate.

>You seem to think that non programmers don't ask LLMs to program for them.

Because they largely do not. Are you actually under the impression that the average person is using chatbots to program? That’s wayyy off.

>Maybe that's why you're comfortable here thinking you're definitely will keep being in demand.

I’ve made no such claim, this a complete non-sequitur.

>Believe me they do ask an LLM to write for them various tools and bots and what LLM writes can in turn consume tokens like crazy be agentic or whatever the latest hype word is.

The average person does not do this. Come on, dude.

>even without that uploading a resume is not "write emails based on a number of docs and spreadsheets and other emails and Slack chats plus some websites and iterate on it multiple times".

It’s much closer to the average usage. All of that is still far less than agentic coding.

> using chatbots to program

They don't use chatbots to program. They use chatbots to get shit some. Sometimes that involves a program.

You know how a regular person can simply prompt a chatbot to generate a chatbot for them that would automate dating (incl messaging) and they get the full thing with handholding about what to press to get it running? Yeah. (If your model can't do it yet then try %someothermodel% or wait for a couple months.)

Your assumption that no one surely ever uses this for actual work purposes is funny. imagine you're preparing some slides and you need to process some data into it and the thing generates a script to do it. now imagine that generated script also calls some chatbot api and so on;)

This comment is odd given that it's high on opinion without ever refuting the actual data given in the article.

Like it or not, many business people spend hours a day writing emails. The article pointed out specific data showing AI could reduce these hours spent while raising quality.

I'll take the article's actual data and research over your data-free spouts of "That's definitely not worth it" and "Useless".

I’m not saying “It’s crazy to ever write emails with AI.”

I’m saying it shouldn’t hardly cost any money, emails are not token intensive and most people could likely use the free version of chatbots just fine.

Except that many companies are pushing "Use AI for everything" -- seriously. Because the CEO was told by KPMG or whoever that "AI is the future". And so yeah, they're pushing it regardless of whether it makes actual sense to use it or not.

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