Ask HN: What is the biggest problem LLMs solved in your life/work
11 mrs6969 11 8/23/2025, 11:46:15 PM
I have been thinking about this, and don’t have a proper answer for myself.
I like llms, or lin other words, I like that we are getting better at something.
However, just want to ask; what was the initial problem llms were trying to solve, what problem did they solve so far?
Do you have any examples in your life or work, which you can clearly say “we were not able to do this before llms, but now we can” or “we were able to do it, but not good enough, it was causing us some issues, now it is a lot better”
If the answer yes; second question would be like, does the total cost of those problem at least equal or exceeding the amount of investment on these models?
Thanks in advance
Because it's the wrong question!
It's not that LLMs solve entire classes of life/work problems. Instead, they take some life/work task (coding, ideas generation, learning about new topics, personal reflection) and make them x% easier, y% faster, z% better.
2. Giving some structure to my opensource project ideas. I had a good time getting over my analysis-paralysis while writing them down.
It’s almost like reliving the late 1990s with far more ads, more vanilla websites, and worse search engine quality.
I finally do now.
I have done so much in the last 3 months.
1. Cleaned up my personal website and blogs 2. Built a couple of learning tools for myself - https://rfc.stonecharioteer.com and https://github.com/stonecharioteer/goforgo 3. Setup OpenWRT and Adguard+Unbound at home, with a non-trivial failover with multiple WANs.
It's helping heal my burnout, something that crippled me for years and kept me from my side projects. It showed in my career too, because I've stagnated since 2021. I'm trying to improve now, and I'm relying on Claude Code and ChatGPT (albeit on legacy models) to do so. 3.
this motivated us to get him a real therapist and have a long conversation about the dangers of humanizing ai