With copilot included in Professional-grade Office 365 and some politician claiming that their government should use AI to be more efficient. I am curious on whether some of you did use “AI” to get some productive things done. Or if it’s still mostly a toy for you.
Used it as a toy for the longest time but by now I had to do a lot of coding and I was actually able to make good use of code completion AI.
Saved me about a quarter of my time. Definitely worth something. (FYI I use supermaven free tier).
Also I’m using ChatGPT to ask dumb questions because that way I don’t have to constantly interrupt other people. And also as a starting point to research something. I usually start with ChatGPT, then Google specific jargon and depending on the depth of the topic I will read either studies, articles or forum threads afterwards.
It did take me a long time to figure out which AI and when to use it, so mandating this onto the entire government is a gong show more than anything.
No AI is not useless, but it’s always a very specific use case.
If you’re interested, I suggest using the free ChatGPT version to ask dumb questions together with Google to get a feel for what you get. Then you can better decide if it’s worth it for you.
The amount of shit we have to clean up from devs using AI generated code nowadays is insane. Some people are using it to generate the bulk of their code and the output can be trash tier.
I was supposed to have a nice long weekend to rest and I spent most of it cleaning up after clients who pushed AI generated code into production that froze all data processing. Even after we found the problem and fixed it for them, the data didn’t catch up until yesterday afternoon. The entire holiday I had to spend with a laptop a few feet away on a Teams call because a dev used AI-gen code.
I am not saying that it isn’t helpful to your situation. What I am saying is that a growing number of outfits are starting to depend on “devs” who’s code is mostly LLM generated, and they push it without understanding what it does or how it interacts with the environment they are deploying it in.
Yeah. I think AI literacy is a real thing and should be taken seriously. Before generating everyone should internalize the boundaries and limitations of any model used.
If you have a hammer, everything’s a nail. And that reflex exists with AI as well, so everyone who uses is has to be careful in regards to that.
I use it as a glorified Google search since Google search is absolute dogshit these days. But that’s about it. ChatGPT is one of the most over hyped bullshit I’ve ever seen in my life.
You shouldn’t use it for search like that. They (Gemini and ChatGPT) love to be confidently incorrect. Their perfect grammar trick you into believing their answers, even when they are wildly inaccurate.
Copilot is actually linked directly into their search engine and it provides the links it pulls its data from. But you’re correct, ChatGPT is not hooked into the live internet and should not be used for such things. I’m not sure if Gemini is or not since I haven’t used it or looked into it much, so I can’t comment on it.
Edit: I stand corrected, ChatGPT is hooked into the live web now. It didn’t used to be and I haven’t used it in awhile since my work has our own private trained model running that we’re supposed to use instead.
I use GPT in the sense of “I need to solve X problem, are there established algorithms for this?” which usually gives me a good starting point for actual searching.
Most recent use-case was judging the similarity of two strings: I had never heard of “Levenschtein distance” before, but once I had that keyword it was easy to work from there.
Also: cmake and bash boilerplate
Describing a concept and getting the term is awesome with an LLM.
I’ve found documentation and discussions of various strategies I’m considering in tech work.
I describe my idea, the LLM gives me the existing term for that strategy, and then I can find discussion, guides, and theory about that. Keeps me from reinventing the wheel.
I think I’m going to disagree with the accuracy statement.
Yes - AIs can be famously inaccurate. But so can web pages - even reputable ones. In fact, any single source of information is insufficient to be relied upon, if accuracy is important. And today, deliberate disinformation on the internet is massive - it’s something we don’t even know the scale of because the tools to check it may be compromised. </tinfoilhat>
It takes a lot of cross-referencing to be certain of something, and most of us don’t bother if the first answer from either method ‘feels right’.
AI does get shown off when it’s stupidly wrong, which is to be expected, but the world doesn’t care when it’s correct time and again. And each iteration gets better at self-checking facts.
Messed around for a while and then nothing. Not sure if I’m being AI-averse but i really can’t find good use for it.
I use it to summarize work notes.
My work often involves talking a lot of observation notes and I used to spend a lot of time sifting through them to make the actual summaries and analyses. Now AI basically does my first draft and I can even ask it to highlight examples of different things from my notes. It honestly saves me a lot of time and effort but also proves to me that on it’s own, AI still isn’t good enough to beat a real human expert, it’s just WAY faster and gets me like 70~80% of the way there in seconds. I was at a conference just a few weeks back and found at least one other person in my field of work doing the same and a lot more people were looking to adopt it for this kind of use specifically after our discussions.
This practice is banned at our company and it is a fireable offence. We also do not allow for code to be shown or shared on Teams. If there is ANY confidential information or even proprietary internal subject matters in your notes, you are essentially feeding it to the AI to plagiarize.
Nothing that would be proprietary, I don’t work in software or tech. And a simple find and replace all gets rid of any confidential or personal information before I paste it into any AI. Redacting and/or concealing confidential info has been a thing I’ve had to do way before AI
I’ve used it productively this week by…
- Summarising and finding relevant parts of Microsoft Teams meetings.
- Finding relevant parts of the labyrinthine policies I have to comply with.
- Quickly finding out what’s going on with corporate events in the market.
- Generating SQL code instead of starting a blank query from scratch (I can never remember the exact way to declare various structures)
- At home, feeding private documents into Ollama for insight and producing compliance reports.
- Instructions for stepping through flashing some temperature sensors.
