LLMs and How You Spend Your Time

LLMs (large language models) should make you think about how you spend your time

You don’t even have to change how you spend your time, but you should at least consider it. Now that AI exists, you should take a few days to evaluate if you should be doing any of the things you are doing day to day.

For instance, I didn’t code a single line of this blog. That would be a silly use of my time unless I found the coding to be therapeutic or something. I could code it by hand, but I have so much other stuff that I want to do …like write this post or read Dungeon Crawler Carl.

What makes me laugh is that there are entire subreddits against using AI at all. I think that is insane. Check out r/antiai if you want to see a group of people who think the answer to should I use AI for this? is always no.

Saving time and having fun

I had to make a vision document for engineering a few weeks ago because they wanted a north star to keep in their heads as they worked on near term initiatives. Before LLMs, that would have taken me forever and been a huge pain to write. I would have had to go over it 100x and have multiple people edit it to make sure I was conveying what I was intending.

Instead of sitting down at my computer for hours, I called a coworker and asked if we could just talk about vision and record the call? We just played the yes and game for 20 minutes and had a blast.

Imagine a world where candy fell from the sky!

Yes! Aaaaaannd what if that candy cured type 2 diabetes instead of caused it?

Yes! AAAANNND what if no one posted on Instagram about it so they could just enjoy the candy?

We had a blast. Our meetings automatically get transcribed so we passed that to an LLM and said based on this conversation about our vision of the future, please make a vision document that would clearly communicate it to a technical audience.

It did an amazing job. We just had to ask it to trim it down so we didn’t provide them an entire novel on the vision. So a 20 minute phone call that was fun and asking AI to be a little more brief replaced hours and hours of work that I would have had to spread over days. Snd it probably did a better job in 30 minutes.

I also didn’t abdicate my responsibility of creating the vision to AI! AI just pushed around and manipulated data from one medium to another until I was happy with the result.

And the result for me was more fun at work while creating a better product. Now that is a win win.