[perardi]

OK, everyone is (rightly) bringing up that relatively small but really glaringly prominent AI boyfriend subreddit.

But I think a lot more people are using LLMs for relationship surrogates than that (pretty bonkers) subreddit would suggest. Character AI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character.ai) seems quite popular, as do the weird fake friend things in Meta products, and Grok’s various personality mode and very creepy AI girlfriends.

I find this utterly bizarre. LLMs are peer coders in a box for me. I care about Claude Code, and that’s about it. But I realize I am probably in the vast minority.

[razodactyl]

We're very echo-chambered here. That graph OpenAI released had coding at 4% or something.

[ComputerGuru]

I remembered it being higher, but you are correct. All “technical help” (coding + data analysis + math) is 7.5%, with coding only being 4.2% as of June 2025 [0]. Note that there is a separate (sub)category of seeking information -> specific information that’s at 18.3%, I presume this could include design and architecture questions that don’t involve code, but I could be wrong.

[0]: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34255/w342...