171–180 of 445 posts
What are the actual use cases that can generate revenue or at least save costs today? I can think of: 1. Generate content to create online influence. This is at this point probably way oversaturated and I think more sophisticated models will not make it better. 2. Replace junior developers with Claude Code or similar. Only sort of works. After all, you can only babysit one of these at a time no matter how senior you…
Full disclosure: I'm currently in a leadership role on an AI engineering team, so it's in my best interest for AI to be perceived as driving value. Here's a relatively straightforward application of AI that is set to save my company millions of dollars annually. We operate large call centers, and agents were previously spending 3-5 minutes after each call writing manual summaries of the calls. We recently switched to…
It’s interesting how self-reports of productivity can be wrong. For example a study from METR found that developers felt that AI sped them up by 20%, but it empirically it slowed them down by 19%. https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
How you use AI will depend on the model, the tools (claude-code vs cursor vs w/e), your familiarity and process (planning phases, vibe coding, etc.), and the team size (solo dev versus large team), your seniority and attention to detail, and hard to measure effects like an increased willingness to tackle harder problems you may have procrastinated on otherwise.
I suspect we're heading to a plateau. I think there's a ton of polish that can be done with existing models to improve the coding experience and interface. I think that we're being massively subsidized by investors racing to own this market, but by the time they can't afford to subsidize it anymore, it'll be such a commodity that the prices won't go up and might even go down regardless of their individual losses.
As someone who knows they are benefitting from AI (study shmuddy), I'm perfectly fine with things slowing down since it's already quite good and stands to be much better with a focus on polish and incremental improvements. I wouldn't invest in these AI companies though!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pro-tip: don't write the summary at all until you need it for evidence. Store the call audio at 24Kb/s Opus - that's 180KB per minute. After a year or whatever, delete the oldest audio. There, I've saved you more millions.
This works unless you want to automate something with the transcripts, stats, feedback.
Edit: Tell me more how preemptively spending five figures to transcribe and summarize calls in case you might want to do some "data engineering" on it later is a sound business decision. What if the model is cheaper down the road? YAGNI.
AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44940944
PDF report that was taken down/walled: https://web.archive.org/web/20250818145714/https://nanda.med...
Full disclosure: I'm currently in a leadership role on an AI engineering team, so it's in my best interest for AI to be perceived as driving value. Here's a relatively straightforward application of AI that is set to save my company millions of dollars annually. We operate large call centers, and agents were previously spending 3-5 minutes after each call writing manual summaries of the calls. We recently switched to…
I’d like to see a competent AI replace the time that doctors and nurses spend tediously transcribing notes into a medical record system. More time spent doing the actual job is good for pretty much everyone.
This reminds me of the way juniors tend to think about things. That is, writing code is "the actual job" and commit messages, documentation, project tracking, code review, etc. are tedious chores that get in the way. Of course, there is no end to the complaints of legacy code bases not having any of those things and being difficult to work with.
Full disclosure: I'm currently in a leadership role on an AI engineering team, so it's in my best interest for AI to be perceived as driving value. Here's a relatively straightforward application of AI that is set to save my company millions of dollars annually. We operate large call centers, and agents were previously spending 3-5 minutes after each call writing manual summaries of the calls. We recently switched to…
> it's a huge, measurable efficiency gain. > It's not going to replace anyone's job Mechanically, more efficiency means less people required for the same output. I understand there is no evidence that any other sentence can be written about jobs. Still, you should put more text in between those two sentences. Reading them so close together creates audible dissonance.
Full disclosure: I'm currently in a leadership role on an AI engineering team, so it's in my best interest for AI to be perceived as driving value. Here's a relatively straightforward application of AI that is set to save my company millions of dollars annually. We operate large call centers, and agents were previously spending 3-5 minutes after each call writing manual summaries of the calls. We recently switched to…