[atomicUpdate]

> My own anecdotal experience is that dozens of non-tech friends, coworkers, etc. tell me that they are using ChatGPT every day. These are people who are telling me how they use it to draft emails, create marketing material, create sales support material, create education material, etc.

My reaction when I hear this is that those people are being paid entirely too much money if an LLM can do their job. I think this is where the real economic impact will come from: when managers realize it's just LLMs generating emails to be summarized by LLMs and it's just bots spamming each other with busy work all day. At some point companies will realize it's all pointless and start trimming these pointless jobs, leaving a lot of people without any actual skills.

[hn_throwaway_99]

> My reaction when I hear this is that those people are being paid entirely too much money if an LLM can do their job.

That feels like such an unnecessarily cynical view to me. First, parent comment didn't say they are using LLMs to "do their jobs". Frankly, I feel that if you're a knowledge worker and aren't using LLMs at least part of the time, you're likely being inefficient. E.g. LLMs don't replace my skill as a software developer, but they sure make it faster to learn new libraries/technologies faster.

[dartos]

Every. Single. Time. I have tried to learn a new library with chatgpt it has been wrong and I just went to read the docs myself.

I like that it can figure out my boilerplate, but I wouldn’t trust any info it spits out.

[WildGreenLeave]

I often experience ChatGPT given outdated information which is wrong at this time, but wasn't necessarily wrong in the past. One big example is a popular framework for Laravel called Filament [0] which released a V3 a few weeks ago. I don't even bother anymore with it because it is useless. However, for example 90% of my DevOps tasks (mostly Kubernetes) are partially done with Kubernetes, either explaining impact or even writing manifests. It is genuinely awesome for that.

[0]: https://filamentphp.com/

[hn_throwaway_99]

FWIW I've had the exact opposite experience with ChatGPT 4. I did have some issues with the code not always being 100%, but I've found it invaluable when I don't know the keywords for what I should be searching for. E.g. if I want to accomplish something fairly complicated in SQL, I'll explain the problem to ChatGPT, and it has always pointed me in the right direction as to what relatively obscure window function or whatever that I should use.

[dartos]

ChatGpT is good for discovering search terms I didn’t already know, but I’ve learned that I can’t trust any information it gives me.

I’ve had it write incorrect SQL many times, and when it is correct it’s not often the best query, so I only have it write sql for one off queries.

[randomdata]

> LLMs don't replace my skill as a software developer

Not the greatest example. LLMs fundamentally cannot replace software developers. At the end of the day an LLM is just an interpreter, much like python, but using a different programming language. Any input to an LLM is developing software.

Perhaps the previous comment would be more understandable if phrased as:

"My reaction when I hear this is that those people are being paid entirely too much money if software developers can do their job."