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Not everyone is using AI for everything

gabrielweinberg.com

21–30 of 565 posts

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#22
post #10
post #6

[flagged]

Cant really understand if this is trolling or outright AI psychosis

They are a self-described 10x coder who moves AI slop, so almost certainly the latter.

I think we might be facing a cultural reckoning on what being "productive" actually means. Creating more products doesn't mean more production.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#23
post #11

Bit of an odd decision to build an entire article around a clickbait headline from July 2025. Talk about a strawman. That aside, this piece is interesting and ties together some useful numbers and studies. I hadn't seen the recent Microsoft paper showing: > 30 percent of the US working-age population is using AI [...] with at least 90 minutes of usage time in a given month. I'm honestly impressed at how high that num…

How much of that use is driven by corporate mandates to use AI anywhere and everywhere (even when it's a terrible fit)?

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#24
> AI has gotten so good that despite any misgivings, “everyone is using A.I.”

In my experience, it's a mixed bag. I wrote this comment[0], yesterday. It reflects my current work, and how I am integrating an LLM.

I have used it for two parts of my project:

1) The backend (PHP), and

2) The frontend (Swift)

It has been a huge help, in both, but #2 is a cautionary tale. It really needs adult supervision, in developing native UIKit Swift apps. I'm realizing how truly bad the code it wrote was. I mean, terrible.

That's jarring, because it did a great job with #1. It made sound, reasonable design decisions, and provided code that is better than what I would write.

With #2, it behaved exactly like an inexperienced engineer, panicking, when confronted with real-world problems. My rewrite is going to feature a much simpler, sound approach.

All that said, it has been a net positive, and has increased my productivity by a large margin.

I guess the lesson I needed to get from this, is that it is good at helping me to find problems, but maybe not so good at fixing them.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48515217

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#25

I've noticed several companies replacing deterministic systems in their support flows with a LLM version that is slower and worse. Many interfaces simply aren't better with AI added

The real best case scenario is using LLMs to help build deterministic systems. Instead of asking an LLM to do some task that you know will be repeated, instead ask the LLM to build a program (Python script or whatever) to do the task.

If it's a one-off script/program that doesn't require additional "domain knowledge", sure. But what if you need to give as context your whole backend repository because you need to take into account a few business rules? Why give anthropic/openai access to my "secret sauce" (e.g., company private repos)?

In that case, it's way better to simply write the code yourself.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#26

> AI has gotten so good that despite any misgivings, “everyone is using A.I.” In my experience, it's a mixed bag. I wrote this comment[0], yesterday. It reflects my current work, and how I am integrating an LLM. I have used it for two parts of my project: 1) The backend (PHP), and 2) The frontend (Swift) It has been a huge help, in both, but #2 is a cautionary tale. It really needs adult supervision, in developing na…

This would be expected. The corner cases people faced with PHP throughout the decades have been well documented on the internet for eons.

Swift, not so much. It's relatively new. Looking at AI's abilities like an engineer's career span scaled about 10-20x of time makes it make a bit more sense.

It's going to be worse at newer/niche things, intuitively - which is only going to get worse as it "learns" from garbage outputted by other LLMs moving forward.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#27

Anyone who does a Google search gets a satisfactory looking answer as the very first entry. I daresay most people don't go beyond that, not even the entries on the first page, let alone go to the next. I argue that this is at the level of everyone for everything.

Even if we accept that all people are satisfied with the AI search overviews, that would still only be everyone for one thing.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#28
I only use AI for software development. For writing, I don't use it at all except to translate source materials. So yes, AI is only for software development in my case. The real question is whether I have any value outside of software development. Sometimes I get the feeling that AI is replacing the value I have in society.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#29
post #4

The numbers given in the article are actually consistent with what is usually meant by “everyone” in such statements. Sure, it’s not literally everyone. But it’s a very significant percentage, especially given how quick the adoption has been.

I think what people mean by everyone varies a lot, which is why I wanted to draw attention to more specific numbers. For example, in the Datos data cited[1], on desktop 86% were using traditional search engines >10 visits/month vs. only 21% for AI chat tools. That is indeed a very significant percentage, but more than 4x less than search and (at least I) wouldn't say that ~1/5 is "everyone."

[1] https://sparktoro.com/blog/new-research-20-of-americans-use-...

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#30

Anyone who does a Google search gets a satisfactory looking answer as the very first entry. I daresay most people don't go beyond that, not even the entries on the first page, let alone go to the next. I argue that this is at the level of everyone for everything.

What Im question is how is Google increasing Price-per-Click each year if people are clicking less and less on the links below the AI search result

I don’t see the contradiction? If the inventory of clicks is declining and the number of businesses bidding on clicks is more or less constant, why wouldn’t that increase price?
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