Of course, some engineers have stopped writing PR descriptions since the bot will do it for them. But that means that the only people who can effectively review that PR are the ones who already know what it's supposed to do, which is generally a small pool.
This has been a pattern I've seen repeated with workplace AI: they make something hard a little bit easier, but in a way that will the underlying problem worse over time.
Last week alone I launched two mini side projects, apparently using "code vibing" technique. Didn't know what I was doing had a name. - https://github.com/antonbelev/llm-fuse and https://github.com/antonbelev/hexo-bluesky-feed if you are interested.
I feel LLMs open the productivity door for me. Especially, outside my day-to-day work.
Yes, the tools I've built are not using the best practise, they may have little bugs here and there, but at least I can iterate quickly over my ideas, and get something out there.
So far I'm focusing on tools which I know at least I will be using for my personal blog.
Anytime we talk to the client on a call we use Gong for text transcription (https://help.gong.io/docs/see-a-call-transcript). After the call is transcribed, it summarizes the call, gives you items to follow up and has chapters as the conversation topic changes.
Once I get all of the documentation, statements of work, any artifacts that we come up with, etc, I use Google’s NotebookLM. I put all of the artifacts in it including transcripts before I came in the project. You can then ask it questions and it will give you answers either with citations to your sources that you included.
I use ChatGPT along with NotebookLM to write the assessments and requirement docs along with a project plan. I’ve been doing this type of writing for awhile before LLMs were a thing so I do a lot of prompt iteration and editing so it sounds like me and not “AI Slop” (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42909042).
After the project is signed, I then become a tech lead.
ChatGPT has been well trained on the AWS SDK for various languages, Terraform , the CDK etc. I use it to write scripts and Lambdas involving AWS. I don’t get a chance to do as much hands on coding as I use to between working with sales and as a tech lead.
I once used it to create a simple Hello World API. I was demonstrating to a Java shop how to deploy APIs to Lambda, ECS (AWS’s Docker orchestration service) and EC2 via Ci/CD. I was upfront with then about not knowing Java. I am a c#/Node/Python guy.
All of the tools I mentioned are specifically approved by my company and we use GSuite as our corporate standard and I think we added the pro version of NotebookLM to each seat a couple of weeks ago.
We transitioned from a team of manual chatters, to hard-coded conversational scripts to an LLM-driven approach. This change has allowed us to handle interactions more accurately and scale to a much larger number of conversations per day.
Less grandmas are falling victim to crypto scams. Thanks AI.
I also get sysadm and networking ideas from LLMs. Although here their imagination has no limits and you have to fact-check everything. They imagine cli/config options, whole daemons and docsites, everything.
To sum up: for exploration and one-shot doing by example.
In the past, I've had good results combining the artifacts' React UI elements into Figma for mockups.
Some things are just faster with an LLM like making a dropdown and filling it with text, instead of doing it in Figma and manually typing out a bunch of dropdown items.
- I use them to OCR PDFs from my bank
- I use them as a search/replace tool on CSVs
- I use them to replace Google searches
- I use them to code
- I'm trying to use them to view (still frames from) cameras periodically
I'll think of more uses, I'm sure. My work is very low tech and simple.
I also use it to learn new stuffs e.g. Flink. I don't always trust it even if it works, though.