The LLMs, after a three year reign, are possibly on the way out. Or at least – there is now significant pushback and skepticism about their efficacy, their efficiency, their incredible energy use. They have been rightfully condemned for their tendency to hallucinate (ie make things up when they don’t have the correct answer), to sycophancy (ie explicitly trained to tell their users whatever they want to hear, reflecting not just their users’ tastes and opinions – but encouraging their users own WORST tastes and opinions. Like social media, they are designed to be addictive, pestering their users at the end of every answer, hallucinated or not, with further suggestions and queries, with the familiar, seemingly helpful tone of the eager assistant, designed to keep the user keeping the thread open as long as possible.

But the LLMs DO have their uses – and I’ve been using Chat GPT, still my default, almost since it appeared in December, 2023. I signed up for a Pro account as soon as it came out in January 2024. I’ve tried to write with it, I used it for study, as a replacement search engine. Seduced by a piece in the New Yorker ‘A Coder Considers the Waning Days of The Craft‘, I pondered giving up coding, or at least giving up coding without the integration of the LLMs, and build apps in languages and frameworks I either didn’t know well, or had forgotten, relying heavily on LLMs to fill in gaps in my knowledge. When, stymied by a collapsing NYC tech job market, I took up freelancing, I used LLMs as an assistant to deal with page builders, optimizations, SEO, integrations – subjects I sort of knew, or had known from last iteration as a freelancer 10 years before. I used the LLMs for job search, CV optimization, I used it to research and write copy, find and configure plugins and, when I returned to using Laravel and Django after a few years absence, I used the LLMs in an attempt to get back up to speed. I experimented with LLMs to write, or analyze books, find historical and Biblical and mythical analogies for stories I was writing or planning to write. I briefly experimented with generating images, even video.

Success? Mixed. Very mixed. I should have been more attentive and kept an ongoing log of what worked, what didn’t. I should have written blog posts, documenting my finds. But I didn’t. I was overwhelmed by the firehose of information about AI, and all the wonderful things it could do, all the jobs it would replace. I used it day-to-day on a sort of intuitive, almost unconscious level and attempted to control its voliminous flood of information, opinion, sometimes complete BS.

But here, I’ll try to unpack how I’ve been using the LLMs, mostly Chat GPT: what I’ve found useful and what I really haven’t.