Ask HN: What is the biggest problem LLMs solved in your life/work
I have been thinking about this, and don’t have a proper answer for myself.
I like llms, or lin other words, I like that we are getting better at something.
However, just want to ask; what was the initial problem llms were trying to solve, what problem did they solve so far?
Do you have any examples in your life or work, which you can clearly say “we were not able to do this before llms, but now we can” or “we were able to do it, but not good enough, it was causing us some issues, now it is a lot better”
If the answer yes; second question would be like, does the total cost of those problem at least equal or exceeding the amount of investment on these models?
Thanks in advance
> I have been thinking about this, and don’t have a proper answer for myself.
Because it's the wrong question!
It's not that LLMs solve entire classes of life/work problems. Instead, they take some life/work task (coding, ideas generation, learning about new topics, personal reflection) and make them x% easier, y% faster, z% better.
1. Filling in the intermediate gaps in design and architecture in enterprise project. I think of it as a half-mentor that may lead to my growth.
2. Giving some structure to my opensource project ideas. I had a good time getting over my analysis-paralysis while writing them down.
My father who doesn’t speak English well, was experiencing a heart attack at home at night by himself and he asked it symptoms and it told him to drive himself to an ER, so he listened to it. I’m thankful that he’s here today.
Similarly, my father had a delicate CV issue recently (he's fine now!). We were only able to do the best research on risks, best approaches, etc with the help of LLM deep research. We would be mostly flying blind-trusting the first doctor we talked to.
Ah not sure the driving himself part was the best idea but I’m glad to hear the LLM helped and your dad is ok!
Google search has become so poor, I now use copilot instead of it, Bing, DuckDuckGo, or Yahoo.
It’s almost like reliving the late 1990s with far more ads, more vanilla websites, and worse search engine quality.
Seems like an intentional move to get more people accustomed to Gemini (or the others)
The industry was flooded with "talent" 2018-2022. LLM dependence has lowered the bar for professional excellence while thinning the ranks of talented newcomers by discouraging them. I think I'll be able to work through retirement age without having to settle for eastern European rates. In 2021 that seemed less likely.
LLMs don’t help at all with engineering and knowing what problems should be solved. Knowing how to deal with XYProblems, dealing with “the business”, go to market strategies, etc. They help with coding.
If (the royal) your claim to fame is “I codez real gud”, you would be screwed post 2022 with or without LLMs.
On that same note, at 51 years old, if my only means of staying competitive and employable is that I can reverse a b tree on the whiteboard, I’ve done something horribly wrong with my life.
Burnout. I'm enjoying building things again, I burnt out because I didn't finish projects.
I finally do now.
I have done so much in the last 3 months.
1. Cleaned up my personal website and blogs 2. Built a couple of learning tools for myself - https://rfc.stonecharioteer.com and https://github.com/stonecharioteer/goforgo 3. Setup OpenWRT and Adguard+Unbound at home, with a non-trivial failover with multiple WANs.
It's helping heal my burnout, something that crippled me for years and kept me from my side projects. It showed in my career too, because I've stagnated since 2021. I'm trying to improve now, and I'm relying on Claude Code and ChatGPT (albeit on legacy models) to do so. 3.
chatgpt was acting like my dads therapist and was making him pretty depressed.
this motivated us to get him a real therapist and have a long conversation about the dangers of humanizing ai
Automation.