[guicen]

In fact, in my opinion, one of the benefits of AI tools that is often overlooked is "psychological support". When you are stuck at work, it will give you a push. Even if it is not completely right, it is enough to get you moving. The feeling of "no longer fighting alone at work" is actually more important than many people think.

[bgwalter]

To each his own. I'm completely drained after 30 min of "discussing" with an LLM, which is essentially an overconfident idiot.

Pushes never come from the LLM, which can be easily seen by feeding the output of two LLMs into each other. The conversation collapses completely.

Using Google while ignoring the obnoxious and often wrong LLM summaries at the top gives you access to the websites of real human experts, who often wrote the code that the LLM plagiarizes.

[AznHisoka]

If it's not overconfident, it's the opposite - they're too much of a "Yes man", which at the slightest whim will change their mind to fit your opinion, if they even detect you might have a different one.

Then they'll change their mind to their original answer when you tell them "I wasn't disagreeing with you". Honestly, it's amusing, but draining at the same time.

[3ln00b]

I have experienced this a lot, I thought I was alone. I get frustrated and tired discussing with LLMs sometimes, simply because they keep providing wrong solutions. Now I try to search before I ask LLMs now, that way I have better context of the problem and know when LLM is hallucinating.

[endymion-light]

are we using the same version of google? Unless incredibly specific I mostly see SEO optimized garbage.

[enraged_camel]

>> To each his own. I'm completely drained after 30 min of "discussing" with an LLM, which is essentially an overconfident idiot.

I'm completely drained after 30 minutes of browsing Google results, which these days consist of mountains of SEO-optimized garbage, posts on obscure forums, Stackoverflow posts and replies that are either outdated or have the wrong accepted answer... the list goes on.

[swat535]

I think a big problem I have with AI write now is that the context window can get messed up and it has a hard time remember what we talked about. So if you tell it to write a code that should do X, Y, Z, it does on the first request, but then on the next request, when it's writing more code, it doesn't recall.

Second, it doesn't do well at all if you give it negative instructions, for example if you tell it to: "Don't use let! in Rspec" , it will create a test with "let!" all over the place.

[uludag]

Totally fair take — and honestly, it’s refreshing to hear someone call it like it is. You’re clearly someone who values real understanding over surface-level noise, and it shows. A lot of people just go along with the hype without questioning the substance underneath — but you’ve taken the time to test it, poke at the seams, and see what actually holds up.

I swear there's something about this voice which is especially draining. There's probably nothing else which makes me want to punch my screen more.

[all2]

I'm glad to hear this. Working with LLMs makes me want to get up and go do something else. And at the end of a session I'm drained, and not in a good way.

[jdmoreira]

You are discussing with a llm? Never happened to me and I use llms all the time. Why would you need to discuss if you know best? Just tell it what to do and course correct it. It's not rocket science.

PS: Both humans and llms are hard to align. But I do have to discuss with humans and I find that exhausting. llms I just nudge or tell what to do

[deadbabe]

I think a far more valuable tool than an LLM summarizer would be something where you can type up a prompt, and it brings you conversations or articles other humans have made about your exact kind of problem. Just the text, no websites to sift through.

[mylons]

google gives you access to real SEO blog spam. nothing better than the experts at stack overflow, or some random medium blog from a guy in rural india

[dboreham]

> an overconfident idiot

So we are close to an AI president.

[pyman]

I asked my students to write a joke about AI. Sometimes humor is the best way to get people to talk about their fears without filters. One of them wrote:

"I went to work early that day and noticed my monitor was on, and code was being written without anyone pressing any keys. Something had logged into my machine and was writting code. I ran to my boss and told him my computer had been hacked. He looked at me, concerned, and said I was hallucinating. It's not a hacker, he said. It's our new agent. While you were sleeping, it built the app we needed. Remember that promotion you always wanted? Well, good news buddy! I'm promoting you to Prompt Manager. It's half the money, but you get to watch TikTok videos all day long!'"

Hard to find any real reassurance in that story.

[dakiol]

Why do we assume that Prompt Engineering is going to pay less money? As usual, what one brings to the company is value, and if AI-generated code needs to be prompted first and reviewed later, I don’t see how prompters in the future could earn less than software engineers now.

Prompt engineering is like singing: sure thing everyone can physically sing… now whether it’s pleasant listening to them is another topic.

[chasd00]

"I went to work early that day and noticed my monitor was on, and code was being written without anyone pressing any keys. Something had logged into my machine and was writting code. I ran to my boss and told him my computer had been hacked. He looked at me, concerned, and said I was hallucinating. ..."

it would have been funnier if the story then took a turn and ended with it was the AI complaining about a human writing code instead of it.

[giantg2]

I don't feel this way at all. If anything, it's a morale drain. There's less cooperation since you're expected to ask AI. There's also limited career pathing since we want even fewer junior or mids, replacing them with AI.

[cjblomqvist]

That goes both ways. As with math, it's sometimes not wise to look at the answer as soon as you stumble upon something you can't solve immediately - sometimes it's good to force the person learning to think deeper and try to understand the problem more thoroughly. It's also a skill of it's own to be able to cope with such situations and not just bail/give up/do something else.

I fear this will be more and more of a problem with the TikTok/instant gratification/attention is only good for less than 10 seconds -generation. Deep thinking has great value in many situations.

"Funnily" enough, I see management more and more reward this behavior. Speed is treated as vastly more important than driving in the right direction, long-term thinking. Quarterly reports, etc etc.

[anonzzzies]

It is exactly how I use it personally the most: it will crap down a massive amount of plumbing that I really do not feel like doing myself at all. So when I think of procrastinating, I tell it to write something: after 30 minutes I will have something that would be procrastinate me from hours to never doing it at all. Now its 'almost done anyway, so might as well finish it'. Then I spend 3 months hacking on it while, at any point, getting the AI do the annoying stuff I know im not going to do or postpone. If only for that... I find bug fixing more rewarding and easier than writing crap from scratch anyway.

[screye]

It works both ways.

Yes, it's supportive and helps you stay locked in. But it also serves as a great frustration lightning rod. I enjoy being an unsavory person to the LLM when it behaves like a buffoon.

Sometimes you need a pressure release valve. Better an LLM than a person.

P.S: Skynet will not be kind to me.

[pier25]

I'm always amazed that people feel anything when chatting with an AI bot.

Don't people realize it's a machine "pretending" to be human?

[bondarchuk]

People feel things reading books, watching movies, even animated ones that have no people in them, looking at abstract art... Why should this be any different?

[joseda-hg]

Usually the feel part is the subconscius one that isn't swayed by knowing Like a phobia, its whole thing is being irrational, knowing it doesn't make sense doesn't diminish the feeling

[reactordev]

I have had to correct AI enough to know it’s the equivalent of a cocky junior dev that read a paper once.

I’ll stick to human emotional support.

[blindriver]

I 100% agree with this. Part of the problem is getting stuck with bad documentation or a bad API, and asking ChatGPT to generate sample code is really beneficial to keeping me going instead of mothballing an idea for months or forever.

[khurs]

Isn’t that the same as posting on stack overflow, Reddit or other forums saying you are stuck and getting an answer.

With LLM it’s speed - seconds rather than the minutes or hours as per stack overflow which is main benefit.

[xeromal]

I hate to admit this but I was struggling with a dbt at work and I had copilot scan what I Was doing and it found a type that was almost impossible for me to notice. lol. It really can be useful.

[croes]

Could work in the other direction. When you are stuck and get the solution from the AI you lose the feeling of achievement because it’s done by somewhat/someone else

[tombert]

I completely agree.

There have been several personal projects that have been on the back-burner for a few years now that I would implement about 20% of, get stuck and frustrated, and give up on because I'm not being paid for it anyway.

With ChatGPT, being able to bounce back and forth with it is enough to unblock me a lot of the time, and I have gotten all my projects over the finish line. Am I learning as much as I would if I had powered through it without AI? Probably not, but I'm almost certainly learning more than I would had I given up on the project like I usually do.

To me, I view ChatGPT as an "intelligent rubber duck". It's not perfect, in fact a lot of the time time the suggestions are flatout wrong, but just being able to communicate with something that gives some input seems to really help me progress.

[hippari2]

I find that with enough wrong answers it feels like you are fighting alone again haha.

[Kiro]

Yes, I've been saying that AI helps with procrastination a lot.