Posted by dmw_ng 5/31/2026
we just used ai to improve products and services
instead of all this wanking off showing how you go through 1 billion tokens a month (not really that impressive)
what would be way more cool is
i made something that reliably saves others 8 hours a month of busywork
He always asked me to help him build this app and that app and thinks his ideas are million dollar ideas. He has ADHD.
Surprisingly, he really loves LLM. He doesn't care that LLM destroys knowledge worker bargains by stealing work without compensating the original authors. He doesn't care that LLM uses a lot of energy. He doesn't care that LLM will concentrate money in the hands of the few. He doesn't care that the Pope has a crusade against LLM. For someone with humanist tendencies this seems to contradict his beliefs.
All he cares is, "I can make apps now and my 5 year old kids are making games by prompting, and we can make money using this, those who don't will be left behind, including you".
And this slipped to 23rd position on the page.
I first came to HN in the “todo.txt” era of “productivity hacking” and note-taking -platforms like Evernote. Like many people I had a zettelkasten phase, tried to make a second brain, tried to optimize everything blah blah blah.
Over the ensuing 15 years and several career shifts later, it’s fascinating to see how AI as supplanted so many of these tools. However in my personal case, greater professional success has coincided with discernment, i.e., knowing which information is important to internalize and commit to memory, which can be filed for reference, and which can be allowed to fade away or be forgotten.
In my current work, there is a huge amount of information that I really, truly need to know “by heart” to do my job well. There’s an equal portion that I maintain in traditional reference files with reliable retrieval systems. I do use machine learning for certain field tasks, but over time I have been able to learn to do these tasks myself when an internet connection is unavailable.
No LLM tool thus far appears useful for me. One big reason is that I work in a compliance/regulatory space where hallucination is simply unacceptable. If I have to check the output for errors, I may as well just look at the primary source to start with.
Another reason is that in regulatory settings, people will say in filings/documents that they are obeying XYZ law, but it isn’t true. I need to find out *in the field* whether the assertions are true. LLMs are not useful for that, either.
But I think the largest gap is between LLMs’ product promise and my personal professional goals. I want _wisdom_ and clinical experience as a professional, the type of things that accrue slowly over a lifetime and distinguish the people who are truly good at their jobs.
It’s a way of working that I really despise and if it’s the future of the profession I want nothing to do with it.
You make this sound like a bad thing. ADHD isn't always about attention deficit, although it is right there in the name. It's more about attention dysregulation. For those of us prone to hyperfocus, working with AI can provide the kinds of stimulation we crave. I can hardly remember a time when I've felt more engaged with my work, more productive, and more badass.
I actually enjoy the collaborative programming process, and was pair programming with folks before the term was coined. At the end of the day I have the satisfaction of browsing the pretty, readable, DRY, maintainable code we end up with after rounds of refactoring and back and forth. I have always employed linters and code formatters, and this is no different, and my standards are still the same. I yell at the clanker about code duplication, hard-coded assumptions, tightly coupled logic, and in the end, while I don't understand the details of every algorithm, I really understand what we've built and the architecture we've designed.
But prior to this I would rabbit hole. I would try desperately to remember some nuance, or I would not be able to move off a point until I got the validation I was looking for.
The worst is when speaking a foreign language and I hit some complex word in my native language that isn't present in my foreign lexicon. My brain just halts. It wants THAT word or phrase, not a 3 minute detour describing a whole concept.
AI has empowered me to move past these unnecessarily difficult speed bumps in my thinking.
Yep, the same here, I'm a long pair programming enjoyer, but I'd like to raise that collaboration is usually meant with a human being in the context of pp, and prompting and agent to execute a task is nothing like that.
It's allowed me to clear out some long-standing brush on the forest floor. And burn it down once or twice.