[wruza]

Idk, I find their output mediocre and sometimes misleading. But that’s not the worst part and is often cheaper than doing things yourself.

The worst part is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43314958 . We may be still blind to this, but new generations may find themselves on the other side of the fence, so to say.

[TeMPOraL]

IDK, I think the linked comment is right. LLMs drop some of the barriers to experimentation so much, that previously rejected project ideas may just become worth trying out (especially when we're talking about hobby or research ideas, not full products). It also has the same effect on ideas you may have now, that before you'd reject as "too much work".

Case in point: my wife needed a QR code generator so she could stop asking me every time she needs to make some codes. There are tons of such generators out there - webapps, mobile apps, downloadable programs, plugins to graphics software, etc. But the software world is such a pile of shit that I don't trust any single one of them - experience shows that most random utility software like this is ad-ridden garbage or malware.

Before a year ago, I'd just invest time to try and evaluate some solutions, find one that's least likely to record inputs, or show ads, or inject redirects into generated code, or run excessive surveillance of your phone, etc. But since this need manifested last week, I just asked Claude to make me a client-side generator up to my specific needs, and quickly got a static page with (vendored) JS library, to host from a domain I own.

There's tons of super-specific or one-off utilities a person could use to help them with some task - utilities that make no sense as products, and if they exist, they're just loaded with ads and garbage. LLMs today make it feasible to just get the computer to write you such utilities from scratch, on demand, which guarantees they're garbage-free.