this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2025
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Science Memes

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The past 18 months have seen the most rapid change in human written communication ever (mander.xyz)
submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 106 points 1 day ago (3 children)

It's not just the internet.

Professionals (using the term loosely) are using LLMs to draft emails and reports, and then other professionals (?) are using LLMs to summarise those emails and reports.

I genuinely believe that the general effectiveness of written communication has regressed.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 12 hours ago

Yep. My work has pushed AI shit massively. Something like 53% of staff are using it. They're using it to write reports for them for clients, all sorts. It's honestly mad.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)
[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 day ago (4 children)

I've tried using an LLM for coding - specifically Copilot for vscode. About 4 out of 10 times it will accurately generate code - which means I spend more time troubleshooting, correcting, and validating what it generates instead of actually writing code.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I feel like it's not that bad if you use it for small things, like single lines instead of blocks of code, like a glorified auto complete.

Sometimes it's nice to not use it though because it can feel distracting.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 day ago

truly who could have predicted that a glorified autocomplete program is best at performing autocompletion

seriously the world needs to stop calling it "AI", it IS just autocomplete!

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I find it most useful as a means of getting answers for stuff that have poor documentation. A couple weeks ago chatgpt gave me an answer whose keyword had no matches on Google at all. No idea where it took that from (probably some private codebase), but it worked.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 12 hours ago

I'm glad you had some independent way to verify that it was correct. Because I've asked it stuff Google doesn't know, and it just invents plausible but wrong answers.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

I use it to construct regex's which, for my use cases, can get quite complicated. It's pretty good at doing that.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Apparently Claude sonnet 3.7 is the best one for coding

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I like using gpt to generate powershell scripts, surprisingly its pretty good at that. It is a small task so unlikely to go off in the deepend.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 15 hours ago

Like all tools, it is good for some things and not others.

"Make me an OS to replace Windows" is going to fail "Tell me the terminal command to rename a file" will succeed.

It's up to the user to apply the tool in a way that it is useful. A person simply saying 'My hammer is terrible at making screw holes' doesn't mean that the hammer is a bad tool, it tells you the user is an idiot.