And the real maddening part is that search engines have been so enshitfied to make way for AI that’s wrong like 9/10, so you’re forced to rely on it for answers because if you try google, the snake wraps around and eats it’s own tail giving you an AI answer! 
You gotta use AI like it’s a new guy you’re training at work where every single thing you tell them to do they’ll probably do wrong but you have to pay attention and learn their specific fucked up brain so you can anticipate their path of fuck up
I’ve used it to create some simple scripts to do some tedious shit that I didn’t feel like coding myself but nothing serious or professional. For example:
“Here is a big file that has a bunch of data in it but I only need points X,Y,Z, formatted in a JSON which I have provided an example of. Write me a simple python script to do that.”
Works okay for that stuff. Always desk check it with edge cases.
LLMs do really well on short bash scripts, but often presume a lot of things about your system that result in having to rewrite it anyway.
Anything that is even remotely a novel problem AI can’t solve. It doesn’t have the training data for your specific problem. At best it’ll do a web crawl for you and summarize its findings.
If you want to really pull your hair out take a look at AGENTS.md or SKILLS.md. State of the art agentic coding practices: glorified README.md files. (the ai frequently doesn’t bother to read them).
I will say one thing nice about LLMs: they are fairly “human” in the sense that they error in familiar ways. In a way AI is automated human error.
It can help with tedious but relatively non complex work or maybe speed up some exploratory work, anything else and it’s going to make ridiculous mistakes. It’s a useful tool occasionally but nothing I’d lose sleep over if it disappeared.
have you considered that computers are very clever and maybe deleting sys32.dll would work
They do. Most programmers think they’re above average (there were actual statistics on this, maybe from stackoverflow survey) and are mediocre enough that they find it useful/faster long term.
I’m statistically likely to be mediocre myself, but I would rather try to improve than relying on LLMs. Every single coworker I work with who is actually above average hates the forced AI usage.
The AI is right. Just delete that shit and install freeBSD.
I’m using AI for the first time to make simple numbered lists with names. The lists vary from 100 to several hundred entries.
I have to repeatedly ask chatgpt to double and triple check its work and then end up manually counting, editing and doing a lot of the work anyways. Frustrating
why are you doing that?
Nutshell, selling Magic (MTG) cards on informal Facebook gambling pages. People buy numbers for $1-$10 for high value items and I’m not computer literate enough to use Excel/Googl Sheets/spreadsheet programs.
ChatGPT helps a little with the rote task of making a basic list, but double checking my work using AI to make sure I’m correctly counting the number of slots each person has bought has been more trouble than its worth.
i said this before but it’s very good at making you feel like you’re accomplishing something, but you will inevitably hit a wall with any ai project where it just can’t meaningfully contribute anymore. you can work around this issue to an extent by getting really good at you know like project management and splitting your thing up into smaller and smaller chunks but eventually you’ll then cross the second wall which is where you’re putting in way more effort prompting the AI than you would have spent just doing it yourself
I found that in coding same as with creative writing the best use for the AI is as a parrot because you know if you’re hitting writer’s block or if you’re trying to flesh out an idea all you need is something to like kind of spit your own words back at you to kind of help you shake yourself out of that so using an AI as like a sounding board for your ideas I think is somewhat valuable use or using it as a search engine but even the search engine use is only there because search engines have gotten so shitty
for what it’s worth i’d rather program a filesystem from scratch than troubleshoot someone’s cursed computer and the janky setup they need to barely run a video game but that’s besides the point, AI is abysmal dogshit, yes
My coworkers range from “Claude can find errors in my code” to “Yeah I just copy-paste everything from chatgpt”. Those like the former at least can still submit legible code (for now). Those like the latter submit random gibberish and have no idea how it works.
Those like the latter submit random gibberish and have no idea how it works.
That’s ok because neither do they!
It’s probably related to the reason why your Start button took a vacation lol
Only little bits and pieces for projects I have so many backups I’d laugh if the LLM fucked it up, noticed they’re heavily trained on python but near nothing on pascal. I use glm (deepseek, kimi etc) mostly for coding, I get banned just looking at chatgpt. I’ve abandoned google like a one way time capsule to 1997.
Quality is noticably worse for less used languages and frameworks.
Critical support to the slop generators in telling windows users to break their installs
