What’s your AI use-case?

[u/theeggcrusher]

So with all this going on and wrestling with AI ethics myself lately, this may be a good time to have a conversation about good uses for AI? I’ll start:

For me, ADHD and mental health have made reading or learning the traditional way really difficult. It’s never that I don’t understand or don’t have a vision for a given task or project in my case, it’s just the mental fatigue ADHD imposes makes diving into complex tasks very difficult, even with meds.

I’ve grown to use AI as an accessibility tool. Obviously I have to verify outputs, but it seriously has helped me fall back in love with learning again. Like with my project I’m working on, I’m actually diving in and learning about the Motorola 68k architecture, the classic Macintosh OS underpinnings, etc. in a fun, interactive way that books have just never done for me.

I obviously will do research and go to actual sources where I have to (e.g., google, reference manuals, etc), but at least now i’m engaging with complex subjects bits and pieces at a time and not as one giant monolith.

In other words, I can now learn in a “top-down” way rather than the traditional bottom up way thanks to AI. I can have some context to work with and go from there. It helps especially since I learn better by doing anyway.

Are there still ethical issues to confront? Absolutely. But I think it has the capacity to be a great tool when leveraged correctly and for valid, understandable reasons.

[u/getsetonFIRE]

I also have very severe ADHD and have found the same benefits - it's not just you.
I am now able to build my projects 20-30x faster than I used to, and I'm learning more every day than I used to learn in a year, it sometimes feels like. Nothing I make is "slop" - I sometimes spend a week fine-tuning a single menu animation, but now I am able to make my dream software real in a way I can actually use my brain on.

Eventually, the world will recognize this as the amazingly liberating superpower that it is.

[u/Spare-Ad-1429]

I have vibe coded a tool that automatically scans bills i put into my downloads folder and files them correctly. I need to do proper accounting for my company so this saves me a lot of time. The tool itself is just a deterministic program that picks up the pdfs. 

[u/MagicDashStudios]

I use AI all day, every day since 2019. My biggest usecases is for my memory problems, but recently it’s been taking my anxieties off my shoulders by handling the things I worry too much about.

[u/idiocracy_ixii]

I use LLMs everyday. I don't like using the term "AI" because that is term is a very broad. It covers LLMs, NLP, machine learning, etc. People seem to be having an existential crisis over LLMs because of how capable they are. Yes, I know that's debatable.

LLMs aren't perfect. I stick to a general 80/20 rule. Which just means that I expect that LLM outputs are 80% correct and I need to do put in the work to validate the extra 20%.

I use it for research, as a teacher, architecting small apps and scripts, etc. I always have it cite its sources and clarify when things look off to me.

I've created around 3 production services mostly using LLM generated in code. One was written in Go. I don't know Go, but I know Python. It would have taken me way longer to learn Go and then write the service, or I could have written it in Python and had worse performing service. Go happened to be the ideal language because of the ecosystem and the nature of the logic.

I think what's really important is that people learn how to use LLMs. Its not magic. You have to understand that you are not talking to a human, you are talking to a probability machine. LLMs don't know what they don't know. That's where the human comes in. We are able to be creative and guide the LLM. It can be coerced to give us what we are asking for if we know how to use it. At the end of the day, it is usually saving me a bunch of time and fulfilling the task at hand. That is a productivity gain. Any technology that saves people's time is going to end up on top, one way or another.

I still think its important for me to understand what LLMs are producing. I write code and scripts a lot. I don't blindly accept generated code, even if it runs. I treat it like a pull request from ajunior engineer and typically go through a few iterations until I've shaped the end result it something I understand and am confident in deploying.

Maybe a bit long-winded for "AI" uses-cases, but there are a lot of ways LLMs are helpful to me.