The Internet had plenty of very productive use cases before social networking, even from its most nascent origins. Spending billions building something on the assumption that someone else will figure out what it's good for, is not good business.
And LLM's already have tons of productive uses. The biggest ones are probably still waiting, though.
But this is about one particular price/performance ratio.
You need to build things before you can see how the market responds. You say it's "not good business" but that's entirely wrong. It's excellent business. It's the only way to go about it, in fact.
Finding product-market fit is a process. Companies aren't omniscient.
You go into this process with a perspective, you do not build a solution and then start looking for the problem. Otherwise, you cannot estimate your TAM with any reasonable degree of accuracy, and thus cannot know how much to reasonably expect as return to expect on your investment. In the case of AI, which has had the benefit of a lot of hype until now, these expectations have been very much overblown, and this is being used to justify massive investments in infrastructure that the market is not actually demanding at such scale.
Of course, this benefits the likes of Sam Altman, Satya Nadella et al, but has not produced the value promised, and does not appear poised to.
And here you have one of the supposed bleeding edge companies in this space, who very recently was shown up by a much smaller and less capitalized rival, asking their own customers to tell them what their product is good for.
I disagree strongly with that. Right now they are fun toys to play with, but not useful tools, because they are not reliable. If and when that gets fixed, maybe they will have productive uses. But for right now, not so much.
Who do you speak for? Other people have gotten value from them. Maybe you meant to say “in my experience” or something like that. To me, your comment reads as you making a definitive judgment on their usefulness for everyone.
I use it most days when coding. Not all the time, but I’ve gotten a lot of value out of them.
They are pretty useful tools. Do yourself a favor and get a $100 free trial for Claude, hook it up to Aider, and give it a shot.
It makes mistakes, it gets things wrong, and it still saves a bunch of time. A 10 minute refactoring turns into 30 seconds of making a request, 15 seconds of waiting, and a minute of reviewing and fixing up the output. It can give you decent insights into potential problems and error messages. The more precise your instructions, the better they perform.
Being unreliable isn't being useless. It's like a very fast, very cheap intern. If you are good at code review and know exactly what change you want to make ahead of time, that can save you a ton of time without needing to be perfect.
OP should really save their money. Cursor has a pretty generous free trail and is far from the holy grail.
I recently (in the last month) gave it a shot. I would say once in the maybe 30 or 40 times I used it did it save me any time. The one time it did I had each line filled in with pseudo code describing exactly what it should do… I just didn’t want to look up the APIs
I am glad it is saving you time but it’s far from a given. For some people and some projects, intern level work is unacceptable. For some people, managing is a waste of time.
You’re basically introducing the mythical man month on steroids as soon as you start using these
> I am glad it is saving you time but it’s far from a given.
This is no less true of statements made to the contrary. Yet they are stated strongly as if they are fact and apply to anyone beyond the user making them.
Ah to clarify I was not saying one shouldn’t try it at all — I was saying the free trail is plenty enough to see if it would be worth it to you.
I read the original comment as “pay $100 and just go for it!” which didn’t seem like the right way to do it. Other comments seem to indicate there are $100 dollars worth of credits that are claimable perhaps
One can evaluate LLMs sufficiently with the free trails that abound :) and indeed one may find them worth it to themselves. I don’t disparage anyone who signs up for the plans
Can't speak for the parent commentator ofc, but I suspect he meant "broadly useful"
Programmers and the like are a large portion of LLM users and boosters; very few will deny usefulness in that/those domains at this point.
Ironically enough, I'll bet the broadest exposure to LLMs the masses have is something like MIcrosoft shoehorning copilot-branded stuff into otherwise usable products and users clicking around it or groaning when they're accosted by a pop-up for it.
That's when you learn Vim, Emacs, and/or grep, because I'm assuming that's mostly variable renaming and a few function signature changes. I can't see anything more complicated, that I'd trust an LLM with.
I'm a Helix user, and used Vim for over 10 years beforehand. I'm no stranger to macros, multiple cursors, codebase-wide sed, etc. I still use those when possible, because they're easier, cheaper, and faster. Some refactors are simply faster and easier with an LLM, though, because the LSP doesn't have a function for it, and it's a pattern that the LLM can handle but doesn't exactly match in each invocation.
And you shouldn't ever trust the LLM. You have to review all its changes each time.
I misremembered, because I was checking out all the various trials available. I think I was thinking of Google Cloud's $300 in credits, since I'm using Claude through their VertexAI.
It’s not that the LLM is doing something productive, it’s that you were doing things that were unproductive in the first place, and it’s sad that we live in a society where such things are considered productive (because of course they create monetary value).
As an aside, I sincerely hope our “human” conversations don’t devolve into agents talking to each other. It’s just an insult to humanity.
I use LLMs everyday to proofread and edit my emails. They’re incredible at it, as good as anyone I’ve ever met. Tasks that involve language and not facts tend to be done well by LLMs.
The first profitable AI product I ever heard about (2 years ago) was an exec using a product to draft emails for them, for exactly the reasons you mention.
It's incredibly good and lucrative business. You are confusing scientifically sound and well-planned out and conservative risk tolerance with good business
