[olalonde]

Comments like these make me feel like we're living in different worlds. I use LLMs multiple times a day and they've significantly improved my quality of life. They are also steadily becoming more useful over time (e.g. now solving math problems).

[HerbManic]

I suppose many do live in different worlds.

I haven't found anything out of LLM's that has improved my life. It was a fun little toy but could never find a use case. But clearly, your mileage varies greatly from mine. That's cool.

I just personally don't the use in more when what I think many need is less. But that comes from essentially this point of view - “Better than a thousand hollow words is one word that brings peace.” ― Buddha

[HDBaseT]

I use LLMs daily, both as chat applications and "vibe coding".

I wouldn't say it "significantly improved my life" however. Everything AI has done for me right now is a "Nice to have" but it doesn't fulfill my needs.

[hedora]

I do too, and pay $200/month, but anthropic’s margins on that revenue are negative.

What’s the long term plan? Make it up on margin? 100% tariffs on Chinese open weight models?

I don’t plan on pulling from my 401k for decades, so the long term plan is the part I care about.

[sothatsit]

Enterprises are paying API prices, which are ~9x the price of the plan for the same usage. A lot of people on the plans are not maxing them out either.

[kaon_2]

Why would Anthropic margin's be negative? Inference is practically free for them, so what costs do they have for an additional subscription?

[deaton]

amortized training costs

[sdevonoes]

It’s because people value different things. I could not care less if LLMs make me push code faster to prod. Couldn’t care less if they improve my emails grammar. Couldn’t care less if they crack one unsolved math problem.

[olalonde]

You do not care about these things in general or it's the idea that an LLM is involved that makes you not value them?

[threetonesun]

I’d love it if for once someone on here saying LLMs are some life changing apparatus would give a single example.

[forrestpitz]

My wife was diagnosed with several chronic conditions in the last year. AI tools both diagnosed her before a doctor did (which helped us find the right docs to care for her by figuring out what to look for). One of her conditions (Mast Cell Activation Syndrome) comes with a ton of dietary restrictions. Its helped us immensely in planning meals and identifing food triggers. All of this would have possible with out AI as a tool but would have led to much more pain and suffering and likely taken much longer to figure it out. It's easy to dismiss (especially given the hallucinations) but it's been legitimatly life changing over the last year

[curtisblaine]

> - Significantly increased my productivity as a software engineer

I don't understand this. It increased productivity of every developer in the western world, so it didn't really give you an advantage. Your output is more valuable, but your colleagues' output is more valuable too, and your competitors' output too, and so on. So you're doing more things at the same salary and it's not like your company or your employer is making more money than usual or awarding you more eoy bonus. If your "life-change" is "I'm writing more code" without any other advantage (and with the possible disadvantage of your role changing, or being at risk), why is it desirable?

[olalonde]

Intrinsic motivation. I find developing software inherently enjoyable, and being able to build things faster with less friction simply makes me happy.

[olalonde]

I can give some recent examples.

- Significantly increased my productivity as a software engineer.

- Using it daily for Chinese-English translation. Significantly better than pre-LLM translation software. Also, great at teaching grammar, nuances, etc.

- General Q&A. Like "Googling" but much faster. This is probably the most common use case for me.

[alpha_squared]

> - Significantly increased my productivity as a software engineer.

This is exactly the point that keeps coming up that folks are struggling to grasp, myself included. How are you measuring this? It certainly makes me feel productive, but I'm not sure I can confidently say it has actually made me more productive. It's made the easy stuff a no-brainer (e.g. boilerplate, simple logic) and the moderate stuff really hard. Never mind the hard stuff. Vetting the code has become a whole other job on its own. The only folks I've found who confidently claim it increases productivity appear to be online (and without evidence), because no one in person is willing to claim that and show it.

[capnjngl]

I'll share my experience.

I've never been a developer. Dabbled in frontend web for a bit (HTML/CSS/JS, no large frameworks) and felt like if I really dedicated some time to learning how to code, I'd be pretty decent at it. It's always intrigued me, and I've always had an itch to build things, but just never found the time. I'm in marketing now - I own an agency.

Over the last 6 months since the coding models really began to step up and get good, I've built several dedicated apps to support my business:

-Profitability optimizer and forecaster based on unit economics and current ad efficiency.

-Creative strategy tool that ingests brand and product data and helps explore primary and secondary personas and emotional motivators.

-Reporting tool that processes natural language queries and connects to multiple data sources to fetch results. Can schedule reports to post directly to Slack or email.

All robust and hosted on Railway. Team members can use them. Clients can use them. OAuth via Google.

Would any of this have been possible for me before the rise of frontier LLMs? Absolutely not. Learning the frameworks alone would have taken me longer than it's taken to just... build. Rapidly build and deploy. Total game changer for me.

Oh - and I'm building a game on the side. LLMs know Godot.

[dsharlet]

I can agree with the skeptics that LLM generated code is usually crap. I rarely accept its output without significant edits unless it's truly boilerplate, and I want to avoid the need for that kind of code in the first place.

For me, the killer use case is debugging. I hate wasting time debugging something that should work except for mistakes, and now I do that probably 75% less than I used to because AI does it for me.

I don't know if it makes me that much more productive, but I certainly enjoy my work more not having to do as much tedious debugging, and it feels like I waste a lot less time doing it.

[vunderba]

I have an example I share a lot.

I have about a dozen programs that are now close to ten years old, all running quietly in the background on my computer doing various tasks. I originally wrote all of them as JavaScript/Node programs. That was fine at the time, but the memory usage really adds up, since each one needs its own V8 runtime (anywhere from 50 to 100 MB per process).

I have basically zero familiarity with Golang, but I was able to use an agentic harness to run in the background and convert every single one of those scripts into Go equivalents. Because I've accumulated lots of before-and-after data, it was easy to confirm that the new versions matched the behavior and accuracy of the originals.

End Result: memory usage dropped from tens of megabytes per program to just a couple of megabytes each.

[peab]

I've been able to build things that I otherwise would not have been able to build, in the free time that I have:

- a VST audio plugin

- a wedding website with RSVP functionality

- a relaxing game for my wife

At work, I've been able to build much more than I would have been capable of in the past. I'm a backend eng, and it allows me to build much much nicer frontends than I've ever been able to do in the past.

And before you tell me that the code is crap - it doesn't matter! It may or may not be good code, but it works and serves it's purpose very well. Anyways, I'm I'm not launching a rocket, or putting software into cars.

[olalonde]

> How are you measuring this?

I attempt a programming task with and without LLM assistance. The attempt with LLM assistance is pretty much always completed faster and cleaner.

Another example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43991777

[evdubs]

How much faster? How much cleaner? What tasks are you accomplishing?

[olalonde]

I linked to an example in the comment. In that particular case, I'd say probably 10-20x faster. I do embedded, backend, web and mobile app development.

[baobabKoodaa]

Can someone bring this man a cup of Kool-Aid, stat?

[goosejuice]

> It's made the easy stuff a no-brainer (e.g. boilerplate, simple logic) and the moderate stuff really hard. Never mind the hard stuff. Vetting the code has become a whole other job on its own.

Not everyone has the same requirements, skills, usage patterns, and outcomes. It's that simple.

[shakesbeard]

What a lot of folks are struggling to understand (myself included) is how this actually reflects on the quality of life?

You're more productive? Nice ... for you or your business/employer? Do you also get more free time out of it? With all this free time you could actually travel and do a language school for 3 months. That sounds like an improvement in quality of life to me. Not better translations in that language.

The life of my family (we have a good life) hasn't become significantly improved with LLMs. We still struggle with the same problems as before. These companies don't solve the big problems of societies and that's why I feel like their value is not justified.

[Tubelord]

I've found regarding nuances I discover in language learning it will really fail me. It will tell me the incorrect path, I correct it, it apologizes, then just to see I tell it that latest one was incorrect actually, it apologizes and I can put it in an endless loop of getting it to apologize as I correct it into the opposite of something over and over.

[batshit_beaver]

> Significantly increased my productivity as a software engineer.

You’re going to have to define productivity as it applies to software engineering. With LLMs we’ve primarily seen the number of PRs over time being discussed as a proxy for LoC, as well as the speed of bootstrapping a small project. None of these have a known correlation with economic output. They just feel good, to the programmer, their manager, or both.

> Using it daily for Chinese-English translation. Significantly better than pre-LLM translation software. Also, great at teaching grammar, nuances, etc.

Yes dealing with language is the one area LLMs are actually designed for. But what’s the TAM for machine translation?

> General Q&A. Like "Googling" but much faster. This is probably the most common use case for me.

And now you’re missing any kind of traceability for the information that you “learn,” since it all gets spaghettified and then recombined into a pile of plausible slop with no attribution. Where before you had to do slightly more work to find the information you needed, now it’s available faster but you’re at complete mercy of literally 3 American companies plus the CCP for the accuracy of that information. Most people somehow seem happy with this arrangement.

[olalonde]

> You’re going to have to define productivity as it applies to software engineering.

I meant it in a colloquial way. I just get more done, faster.

> And now you’re missing any kind of traceability for the information

Modern LLM assistants provide sources and references. While it can sometimes be just "slightly faster", it can genuinely save hours of research on complex ones. Also the "slightly faster" can add up to hours saved with frequent use.

[hedora]

We have some exotic chicks the kids picked out, and 4 were going to die of brooder pneumonia.

An LLM correctly diagnosed it, and figure out that we could treat them with Nutri-drench Sheep Supplement, since Tractor Supply was sold out of the chicken version, and they are very similar.

Of course it then immediately recommended we use hemp bedding that would kill them a different way, but the saleswoman sanity checked all of the above,

100% survival rate.

Everyone’s thriving. Chickens would follow the medical advice again, I guess.

[1over137]

Sounds like you have only the saleswoman to thank, not the bot.

[s1artibartfast]

Immediate medical and childcare advice from LLM are pretty life changing.

Interpreting reports, avoiding drug interactions, or knowing when to seek medical care. And before people object- I can literally use the same LLM my doctor does to check these things, without waiting 2 weeks for an appointment.

I helped my parents work through bacterial culture results when my dad was hospitalized with sepsis, and had them ask their doctor for specific follow up tests.

I rebuilt my gas furnace and fixed my dishwasher with AI as an assistant.

Those aren't the fun parts tho. My favorite is touring art museums ancient historical sites with an LLM guide. It can give me a short academic essay about every artist, painting, or artifact. It can pull out details quirky stories about the history that I specifically would find interesting.

I cant recommend this enough. Its like visiting with a 10 PhD docents in art history.

[dh2022]

How do you know it is not hallucinating those quirky stories :)?

[s1artibartfast]

How do you trust a book, blog, tour guide, or art history teacher?

How do you trust the placards under a piece of art?

The short answer is you accept that it isn't perfect and move on with life. I have found multiple errors in all of those things. Human tour guides are especially the worst at making things up.

Part of navigating life is dealing with imperfect information and uncertainty.

Just like with a friend, coworker, or spouse, you use your judgment and track records to decide when to trust what is being said based on subject matter and stakes.

Domain matters. I have found it good at history, but less trustworthy in others. For examle, the llm gave me a bunch of bogus advice as I repaired my dishwasher based on weather models that weren't accurate. There is also a lot of bad information on Reddit and Appliance blogs. Repairman are almost as bad as the tour guides, willing to lie straight to your face. I deal with it the same way.

[deaton]

Because generally speaking people have a firm grasp on truth and lies are intentional, predictable, and rare. LLMs have a tenuous grasp on reality at best and make things up constantly.

[s1artibartfast]

I have found them to be as good as people and in some contexts much better.

[dh2022]

I trust Wikipedia- and it is available on iPhone

[spacebanana7]

I used Gemini to fix my new boiler by taking various photos and asking it for help. It saved me a plumber call-out (this was a user error issue, nothing safety critical).

Gemini also told me about some obscure procedures to fix my wedding paperwork after it’d been submitted with typos.

[fragmede]

Does it have to be an LLM? https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/ai-skin-cancer-nhs...

[Planktonne]

It does have to be an LLM; when people talk about AI these days, they're talking about LLMs; that's the common framing of the discussion. Linking to unrelated ML to argue that AI has benefits is disingenuous.

[fragmede]

> when people talk about AI these days, they're talking about LLMs

If AI means LLMs now, somebody should probably tell Waymo, Sora, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and AlphaFold/Go. They must've missed the memo.

[Cider9986]

Some guy vibe coded a tasks app client that I really like. Not life changing but I couldn't find one that suited my needs since de-iPhoning before this one.

[thepasch]

From experience, whenever someone asks in that particular tone and is actually provided with examples, they proceed to bend over backwards to "prove" that it's secretly not much of an improvement at all/AI psychosis/a mirage/actually harmful/<insert other substitute for "I don't like it therefore you must be wrong" reason here>.

[threetonesun]

I asked - I don't have an opinion either way. I use LLMs, I just don't find them life changing, but I would never deny that in a world with infinite data something that can do a pretty good first pass at parsing and summarizing and organizing it with little effort on the creation end is a good thing.

[wyre]

https://www.the-scientist.com/chatgpt-and-alphafold-help-des...

Literally saved his dog's life.

[hraxz]

Try the prompt to opus 4.8:

does "das man" know they are part of the crowd?

[TrackerFF]

I think it is a typical example of where N% (N tends to zero) of the population GREATLY benefits AI models, while the next bracket (casual users) enjoy some benefit, but the vast majority would not feel any difference if they lost the tech tomorrow.

Let me rephrase that to you: The vast, vast majority of people, even in the western world, even the white-collar part of the population, are not whales or power users of AI models.

I use ChatGPT daily. And I never spend more than $25/month. If I lost it, it would suck, but it would not affect my life significantly. I then see people spending $100 / day on Claude Code tokens, programmers in startups / tech companies rack up thousands a month in bills. These people are literally spending 100x more than me, a casual user.

Yeah, I suspect they follow some sort of whale economics - where a relatively small userbase (in the big picture) and providing them with a huge chunk of their revenue.

But still these companies are being valued as if they're some omnipresent companies which humanity simply can't live without.

[curtisblaine]

So, let's see. LLMs made my overall coding output significantly faster, even factoring in review time and tech debt. My employer should technically benefit from this, but it doesn't really, because all its competitors use the same AIs and all their engineers increased their throughput in a similar way. So I'm not sure that I, my colleagues or the whole segment I work in really benefited from AI in any measurable way.

[nickpp]

Your clients and your competitors' clients did benefit from this overall faster coding output though.

Eventually your employer benefitted too, from more & happier paying customers.

Finally you indirectly befitted as well - through continued employment, salary and bonuses and stock (if you own any).

[curtisblaine]

But that didn't happen in reality, did it?

Clients - I don't see anyone delighted that apps are better, or cheaper, or more secure. If anything, I see more enshittification, more half-baked ideas and more fear that security is worse now that we let AIs write almost all code.

Employers - They didn't really sell more or expanded their customer base. They would have, if they had the exclusive advantage, but now everyone has AI. They can cram more features in their software quicker, but so can their competitors, and AI is not magically opening any untapped market. If anything, everyone is now doing the same thing - trying to get their software on the AI train, with mediocre results so far.

You - did you benefit really? The job market is shit due to the death of ZIRP, the nature of the job itself is changing and there's a lot of uncertainty around. If anything, employees are now laid off more, not less, and salary and bonuses are not increased in any measurable way.

It looks like to me that we have to dance this particular dance because if we don't do we're left behind. That's fine, it happens every now and then. It might even be that in the future we will have tangible advantages from LLMs - better automated health care, better learning opportunities come to mind. That has to be demonstrated. But now, in year 2026, what's one advantage of AI? Having less and pricier RAM? Being able (and expected) to write more code in less time?

[dartharva]

Even if they are, it still doesn't justify the ridiculous levels of overvaluation. They are not essentials and their consumer demand is extremely elastic.

[deaton]

I don't know if its really improved my life at all. Sure I can put together quick and dirty single-use programs faster I guess, but I feel like losing that practice has actively made me a worse developer.

[thuuuomas]

Do you use Grok multiple times per day? Is Grok solving Erdos problems?

[worik]

> Do you use Grok multiple times per day?

No body who has a choice is using Grok

> Is Grok solving Erdos problems?

Mēh! At a slower rate than models a fraction of the price

[minton]

> No body who has a choice is using Grok

The Grok app had over 100 million downloads in 2025, over 60 million active users, and generated $350 million in revenue. That’s a lot of people being forced to use it.

[brazukadev]

Grok revenue is like 100x smaller than xai estimated capex? Doesn't look great.

[baobabKoodaa]

Still more than I expected based on anecdotal experience

[newsicanuse]

Comments like these make me feel like AI is a computer in the hands of a monkey, and that too the computer which is unreliable.

[gib444]

Another generic, useless comment which absolutely refuses to mention any particular aspect, eg how your life has been improved. It's so tiring

And when pushed all we get is another teaser of "Significantly increased my productivity"