ExtremisAndy

Yeah, I'm right there with you. I'm hardly anti-AI, but for a simple life like mine, tools like this, while certainly impressive from a technical achievement standpoint, would just get in the way and make my life more rather than less complicated.

I'm a Spanish teacher that creates a LOT of content in Canvas (the LMS) and I run a website where I share some free tools/scripts I made for myself that help me work with Canvas more efficiently. It runs beautifully 24/7 on a $5 VPS but, admittedly, being such a very niche area, the site gets very little traffic. Still, I'm very grateful for those inexpensive options whenever I have an idea for some app or tool and want to make it available to others!

I'm hoping you're right. I enthusiastically bought PEFI but found it to be way over my head. I'm eager to get SLOC because I'm hoping it can be sort of a bridge between my "MAKE: Electronics" book and PEFI.

Yes. Don’t get me wrong: I use and enjoy these LLMs. But even now, well into 2026, I’m still using them via the now “old-fashioned” chat box in a web browser. Based on all that we’ve learned about this technology, there’s just no way I’m giving it control over any part of my machine. Is it a helpful search engine? Does it save me typing and write some nice code snippets when I need it to? Absolutely it does, and I greatly appreciate the technology. But I’m just not ready to create agents and let them run. I just think that’s still way too risky, and I fear a major, major catastrophe is coming because of how so many people recklessly trust these agents. I certainly hope I’m wrong.

See, this, to me, seems obvious, but I’m sure it’s more challenging/complex than I can imagine (I am NOT an expert on AI in any way imaginable). But there has to be a solution. Just yesterday I was asking Gemini to tell me about a certain college professor, and it gave me a list of facts about them. And it was perfect. Then, out of curiosity, I followed up with “tell me more about him!” and it spit out several more bits of information about this person that were entirely hallucinated (e.g., gave them credit for writing papers they didn’t write, said they won awards that actually someone else won). I know this is all complex and certainly beyond my limited skill set, but goodness, we’ve got to get this figured out with so many people depending on and trusting these things nowadays. It’s quite scary.

I think you may be right. I enjoy tech and programming, but hardly any of my friends/family do. And nearly everyone in my inner circle (an admittedly small number of people, considering I'm an extreme introvert) condemns and avoids AI both for the reasons you mentioned and because they refuse to "outsource my brain to AI!"

In fact, the only time I personally encounter a lot of pro-AI commentary is when I come here to HN (and, obviously, there are plenty of anti-AI people on this site too).

I personally appreciate it and use it, but I'm still "old-fashioned" in the sense that I only ask it for very specific things and always read through what it produces. I'm honestly not entirely sure how I'm supposed to feel about all this. These are interesting times, to say the least.

Oh, my! This does look nice. Thank you for your hard work!

For real! I occasionally write assembly because, for some reason, I kind of enjoy it, and also to keep my brain sharp. But yes, there is no way I could do it without pencil and paper (unless I’m on a site like CPUlator that visually shows everything that’s happening).

This is exactly how I use them too! What I usually do is give the LLM bullet points or an outline of what I want to say, let it generate a first attempt at it, and then reshape and rewrite what I don’t like (which is often most of it). I think, more than anything, it just helps me to quickly get past that “staring at a blank page” stage.

>language is the refuge of educated idiots

I love the way you've expressed this! This was my experience doing the lit review for my PhD. I read more than a few "scholarly" texts that were perhaps impressive from a language/vocabulary standpoint but contained ideas that were either poorly supported or too simple to amount to any meaningful contribution to the field.

I felt this comment in my soul. I’ll never understand it: I’ve written thousands of lines of code (as a hobbyist) to solve all sorts of problems I’ve run into and yet always seem to struggle to wrap my mind around the core algorithms any real developer should be able to handle easily. This is why I’ve never pursued programming as a career.

"AI isn't great at creating software, but it is great at writing functions."

This 100%. In my experience (ChatGPT - paid account), it often causes more problems than it solves when I ask it to do anything complex, but for writing functions that I describe in simple English, much like your example here, it has been overall pretty amazing. Also, I love asking it to generate tests for the function it writes (or that I write!). That has also been a huge timesaver for me. I find testing to be so boring and yet it's obviously essential, so it's nice to offload (some of) that to an LLM!

I have never heard of “jq”. Oh my goodness. Your comment may have just changed my life. I cannot emphasize enough how many times I have needed a tool like this (and, yes, shame on me for not making a better effort to find one). Thank you!