[bathtub365]

The average person already automates a lot of things in their day to day lives. They spend far less time doing the dishes, laundry, and cleaning because parts of those tasks have been mechanized and automated. I think LLMs probably automate the wrong thing for the average person (i.e., I still have to load the laundry machine and fold the laundry after) but automation has saved the average person a lot of time

[zeroonetwothree]

For example, my friend doesn’t know programming but his job involves some tedious spreadsheet operations. He was able to use an LLM to generate a Python script to automate part of this work. Saving about 30 min/day. He didn’t review the code at all, but he did review the output to the spreadsheet and that’s all that matters.

His workplace has no one with programming skills, this is automation that would never have happened. Of course it’s not exactly replacing a human or anything. I suppose he could have hired someone to write the script but he never really thought to do that.

[zahlman]

What sorts of things will the average, non-technical person think of automating on a computer that are actually quality-of-life-improving?

[theshrike79]

A work colleague had a tedious operation involving manually joining a bunch of video segments together in a predictable pattern. Took them a full working day.

They used "just" ChatGPT on the web to write an automation. Now the same process takes ~5 minutes of work. Select the correct video segments, click one button to run script.

The actual processing still takes time, but they don't need to stand there watching it progress so they can start the second job.

And this was a 100% non-tecnical marketing person with no programming skills past Excel formulas.

[simonw]

My favorite anecdotal story here is that a couple of years ago I was attending a training session at a fire station and the fire chief happened to mention that he had spent the past two days manually migrating contact details from one CRM to another.

I do not want the chief of a fire station losing two days of work to something that could be scripted!