Do you use AI?

ewal

stickyfiddle said:

Update from my side....

Last night I thought I'd try using Claude to actually build the music-related website I've had in mind for 15+ years — an idea that, as far as I can tell, nobody has built successfully.

In about 8 hours of total work time, I've gone from zero (and almost zero web development knowledge bar a bit of SQL from a job I left 12 years ago) to a working, hosted URL with a name I'm genuinely proud of, a relational database designed, deployed and populated with proof-of-concept real-world data, a visual identity and style guide drafted, and initial HTML mockups of a couple of pages. I've been bouncing Claude and ChatGPT off each other for a bunch of it - Claude doing the work and ChatGPT helping critique. It feels like working in a small project team and it's remarkable. 

Not bad for a Tuesday!

I will want some beta testers in time... 

Which is obviously great for the individual. But it basically means specialist skills, knowledge and experience completely lose value. Dumbing down at scale. The long term effect on society is a concern. Or will we find other ways of maintaining human intelligence?

JohnS37

DavidR said:

Is it correct that AI stands for American Intelligence?

Oxymoron 

stickyfiddle

ewal said:

stickyfiddle said:

Update from my side....

Last night I thought I'd try using Claude to actually build the music-related website I've had in mind for 15+ years — an idea that, as far as I can tell, nobody has built successfully.

In about 8 hours of total work time, I've gone from zero (and almost zero web development knowledge bar a bit of SQL from a job I left 12 years ago) to a working, hosted URL with a name I'm genuinely proud of, a relational database designed, deployed and populated with proof-of-concept real-world data, a visual identity and style guide drafted, and initial HTML mockups of a couple of pages. I've been bouncing Claude and ChatGPT off each other for a bunch of it - Claude doing the work and ChatGPT helping critique. It feels like working in a small project team and it's remarkable. 

Not bad for a Tuesday!

I will want some beta testers in time... 

Which is obviously great for the individual. But it basically means specialist skills, knowledge and experience completely lose value. Dumbing down at scale. The long term effect on society is a concern. Or will we find other ways of maintaining human intelligence?

… maybe? 

I honestly don’t know. In my case this isn’t something I had the skills or time to do manually, and also not the sort of thing I’m going to pay anyone to do for me. 

In a business context it’s obviously a big question and one that makes me nervous. In a sense I’m in favour of arguments analogous to the washing machine or printing press or computer - people will find new ways of working and new things to do to add value that the machine can’t. But equally, when the likes of Sam Altman are taking about intelligence become something you buy as a service and not something you have yourself but not also linking this with the inevitable need for UBI is terrifying. 

In the corporate world this will mean fewer juniors get hired but that also means there will be nobody to move up the chain and oversee the work getting done. 

digitalscream

ewal said:

stickyfiddle said:

Update from my side....

Last night I thought I'd try using Claude to actually build the music-related website I've had in mind for 15+ years — an idea that, as far as I can tell, nobody has built successfully.

In about 8 hours of total work time, I've gone from zero (and almost zero web development knowledge bar a bit of SQL from a job I left 12 years ago) to a working, hosted URL with a name I'm genuinely proud of, a relational database designed, deployed and populated with proof-of-concept real-world data, a visual identity and style guide drafted, and initial HTML mockups of a couple of pages. I've been bouncing Claude and ChatGPT off each other for a bunch of it - Claude doing the work and ChatGPT helping critique. It feels like working in a small project team and it's remarkable. 

Not bad for a Tuesday!

I will want some beta testers in time... 

Which is obviously great for the individual. But it basically means specialist skills, knowledge and experience completely lose value. Dumbing down at scale. The long term effect on society is a concern. Or will we find other ways of maintaining human intelligence?

In this particular case - building a website - that ship sailed years ago anyway with the advent of systems like Squarespace. Building websites is a commodity service, almost nobody thinks about the basic nuts and bolts of building a basic site these days; you can pay £10/month (not much more than hosting) and get the whole shebang bundled in with the design helper. Ironically, somebody with no HTML knowledge can have a site up and running in a couple of hours...less than doing it with AI.

What it has done is raise the bar for what's considered a "specialist skill". Look at my example, building a code editor - I have absolutely no idea about Rust, but I do know systems and I know how they're supposed to hang together. The result is something that works, but doesn't work as well as it could, which is why mine's quicker than VS Code, but noticeably less responsive than something like Zed.

guitargeek62

I use AI a little, but probably a lot less than people would expect given that I'm a Comp Sci. grad and majored in AI. I also moved into an AI Governance role last year, overseeing the rollout and adoption strategy of the tools inside my firm... in spite of all that, I don't use it very much!  I expect this will change later in the year once we finally deploy Copilot, as I'm looking forward to having a virtual assistant to help with some of the admin overload and offset some of my ADHD challenges, but other than that I don't plan to use it too often.

*edit* Ironically I did spin up a simple agent to double-check my reviews of new tools, based on the same framework I use for my manual assessments. So far it's come out with matches or additional info I wouldn't have considered, so I'll look to formalise that into my process once Copilot's in as it should accelerate things and make my day job that much simpler.


This is ignoring the ubiquitous traditional and more discrete AI in everyday lives too, the likes of FaceID etc which are so pervasive that I doubt any of us don't use it on a daily basis.

mudslide73

I use it for lots of things. GAM, Powershell, Helix patches, travel itineraries, recipes.. lots of stuff. I use it in the same way as @Danny1969 talks about.. like, "tell me how x came about and who's idea started it off?". It's great at writing quick commands and code - it's saved me hours and hours tbh.

WezV

I use co-pilot regularly to check things over.   

It's not creating content for me, it's just a second pair of eyes on my own work.  Sometimes I take its feedback on board, sometimes I ignore it.

It did save me a few hours yesterday on some excel formulas I was struggling with.  I can do it myself, but don't do it regularly enough to always get it right first time.  I put in my formula and asked where I was going wrong, it solved it.   I was close, and could see what I had missed.  I was a bit more productive yesterday than I would have been without it.

It also assisted my wife with some coursework recently.  She was struggling to get hold of her tutor to review some bits of an assignment she was unsure about.  We decided to ask co-pilot for tutor style feedback on what she had already written.  This wasn't a situation where AI could write the assignment as a lot of it was based on personal examples.  It didn't create any content for use in the assignment  But it could say things like, "you might want to consider expanding on the example you provided here to ensure you have covered this part of the marking criteria".  

Haych

I use ChatGPT quite a lot.  Sometimes for work, as Tableau is a bloody nightmare to drive at times (why can't we just use Power BI?), and sometimes for personal general queries.

I find it's just ok for work, it will often hallucinate and give me incorrect answers to questions asked and finally get it somewhere near correct on the fourth or fifth attempt.  But I'd rather have it as a resource than not, it's got me out of a bind quite a few times.

For general queries on everything from the history of modern geopolitics to what speakers would go well with a Fender Pro Reverb it seems quite decent.

stickyfiddle

That coursework example is how I use it a lot. "Critique please" is a comment I use a lot 

axisus

I do graphics and at work I produce fancy leaving cards for staff. In my 36 years here I've done over 200, and needless to say they soak up a fair bit of time that could be better spent! Recently I have managed to speed up the process by producing something in ChatGPT that gets in the right ballpark before sorting in Photoshop/illustrator. Really useful!

Snap

I use Google's AI mode as my standard search engine these days. Use it for all sorts. It's good for planning trips and holidays. Also v good for reviews and "how to do" things. I've got a list of a whole load of AI platforms and what they excel at, and plan to work my way through them. I'm only recently getting into it.
Use it a bit at work, on the research side - v useful for that

Haych

The one thing that pisses me off about ChatGPT:

If I'm using it for a work problem, like I am now, say to help me use Power Automate to do a complicated task, it'll be very helpful and tell me how do do stuff, so I follow the instructions and it doesn't quite work.  There will be some variable or connector with a missing parameter.

So I tell it that what it is suggesting isn't working and it'll go round the houses a bit until it figures out that what it is telling me to do definitely won't work, and then it'll come out with something like, well if that isn't working we can do it this super-duper easy way that does away with all the difficult complicated stuff and this time it's definitely going to work.

So I do it the way it now suggests and it's not only a doddle but it then bloody does work a treat.

Basically, it's deliberately winding me up, making me frustrated and wants me to swear blue murder before going, ah well, this would have worked all along but I wanted to make you sweat and swear a bit!

Bastard AI!

sinbaadi

It does work at "appearing" to cut through the bs if you're trying to choose a service or something. 

You can ask it to consider if there are any hidden fees or upsells, provide straight forward comparisons and save a lot of website clicking.

mo6020

Not directly related to my usage, but I discovered yesterday that internally we're spending $30-50k A DAY in Claude Code tokens at my work. 

stickyfiddle

mo6020 said:

Not directly relateded to my usage, but I discovered yesterday that internally we're spending $30-50k A DAY in Claude Code tokens at my work. 

I don’t know where you work but for a multinational that would surprise me

mo6020

I work for a cybersecurity software vendor - it's pretty cheap when you consider it's roughly the cost of 20 FTE software engineers at Silicon Valley pricing over a year, and apparently our engineer productivity is 10x so to meet a similar ROI we'd have to go from 900 engineers to 9000, which would cost around $4bn...

Neilybob

I use it for work to write emails and documentation and create spreadsheet formulas. 

Had a go at using AI to redesign a guitar and check out how cool this would be!!! I am batman 

sinbaadi

We're going to have one of the most illiterate generations in a long time. 

My other half was saying that everyone in her company use a.i for emails now.  Writing and summarising!  Like what madness is this?!

Nobody is going to be able to write prose anymore.  The interfaces will become smarter and easier, at some point you won't need, even to write your 6 bullet points.  The idea of a paragraph will be as alien as a sonnet is to most, today.

I know it's a cloud to shout at, but seriously...

snowblind

sinbaadi said:

I know it's a cloud to shout at, but seriously...

The decider will be who's cloud gets shouted at the most. Google's, Amazon's or Azure.

Hurling_Fruitmig

sinbaadi said:

We're going to have one of the most illiterate generations in a long time. 

My other half was saying that everyone in her company use a.i for emails now.  Writing and summarising!  Like what madness is this?!

Nobody is going to be able to write prose anymore.  The interfaces will become smarter and easier, at some point you won't need, even to write your 6 bullet points.  The idea of a paragraph will be as alien as a sonnet is to most, today.

I know it's a cloud to shout at, but seriously...

I need to get in quick and write a novel set in a near future where no one can write. I wonder which AI would be best to use?