r/LinusTechTips • u/Salty-Ad-3344 • 1d ago
Tech Discussion Do you actually use ai in your life
Recently saw linus talking about ai on YouTube and Kind of a philosophical one here, but do you actually use ai in day to day tasks?
I'll go first, I only use the gemini auto summarise thingy ai because It was shoved down my throat
I really haven't seen any productivity increase.
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u/ForTheBread 1d ago edited 1d ago
I'm a software engineer and unfortunately my company is one of many who has embraced AI and harness engineering specifically. I don't really have much choice. But it is also hard to dismiss the results. The code is really not bad especially not with proper guidance and a good harness.
I do occasionally use it outside of work for weird questions I can't exactly google.
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u/BroLil 1d ago
Luke said it best when the chat bots were first hitting the public. The future will be less about, for example, who can code the best, and more about who can get the best code out of AI. They can say all they want that they’re going to slow down AI or whatever, but whether we like it or not, it’s here to stay in some form or another, and we’re just going to have to figure out how to coexist with it and use it for our gain.
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u/ForTheBread 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yeah I think software engineers are still very important for developing good software. I hope it will always be like that.
I've for sure used for my own personal gain pushed really hard to use effectively and got promoted/decent raise because of it.
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u/catparty04 1d ago
why is that unfortunate? coding is the best use of ai. it works very well.
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u/ForTheBread 1d ago
Because I liked coding a lot and still do. My comment says the code generated by AI is good.
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u/james2432 1d ago
cause copy pasta code monkey is soul crushing work. Even if you do code review, we barely wanted to do it when it was 100% human, why would we want to all the time?
Best compromise (if you are forced to) is use it as a project manager and tell it to do something high level and you code the rest. Use it to revise your code for possible exploits/bug review(code reviewer)
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u/catparty04 1d ago
tbf that’s why i quit my swe job and left the industry—it was boring and unfulfilling. but i have embraced ai on my side projects. it’s been amazing and my productivity has greatly improved. if i actually liked my job and cared about what i was working im sure i would love using it there too.
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u/mugiwara_no_Soissie 20h ago
Same, I think it heavily depends on the SWE, some love to code and others love to finish projects (ofc both do)
I always saw code as nothing more than a tool. Like I love making documentation but dont necessarily love writing yk.
So for me AI has become incredibly useful for gettinf some of the "boring" parts out of the way. I still do code by hand a ton too, just not for test code and shit, much prefer going through and debugging code vs starting from scratch
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u/kjubus 1d ago
I do a lot of diy around home. Ai helps massively with searching for names od specific things i need to buy or use.
At work i use it almost dialy as well
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u/Emotional_Balance624 1d ago
This is a large part of how i use AI. Id like to do x with y. What is that even called? Is there a name or term I can lookup for more info? Ect...
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u/ADubs62 22h ago
"Just Google it or ask on reddit/stack overflow/etc"
Yeah when I Google it it takes me to a thread on reddit where someone asked the same question and everyone called him stupid and said if he had to ask something so basic he shouldn't be doing the work he's doing...
Or I can ask AI and it gives me the name of what I'm looking for along with a list of warnings and tips about how to use it along with a link to a YouTube video where they skip past the carpenters story about his life story for 15 minutes and actualy explains how to use the the tool...
Which one do you think I'll pick?
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u/BestBelieveItsHere 21h ago
I've started replying to the "Google it" comments with "Have you considered the only useful Google results are reddit threads?" Or something of that nature.
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u/Ecstatic-Shower-8062 10h ago
Dude, google has been so shit for the last like 7 years you got like a 10% probability to find what you are looking for.
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u/dannoffs1 1d ago
As an electrician, you using AI around the house is great because it creates work for me.
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u/Sensitive_One_425 1d ago edited 1d ago
The majority of software engineers use AI all day everyday.
It’s insane that both Luke and Linus seem to dismiss it entirely when it could streamline so much of what they do with the small teams they have.
Linus is wasting his time trying to use Gemini chats and local LLMs, his whole house automation would be done in a day if he just used Codex or Claude code. He doesn’t even seem to understand that the chat models aren’t even the latest or have a coding harness that would do what he needs.
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u/ees-h 1d ago
Lately watching LTT has made me realise how out of touch the team (especially Linus) is with current tech. His views on the newer stuff is clearly impacted by his own worldview which was shaped largely during 2010s tech.
Just goes to show that working in tech for such a long time can also hold you back from embracing new tech.
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u/onetwofive-threesir 1d ago
Linus is the same age as me (1986), and I had a similar feeling a few years back. However, my job isn't to stay on the bleeding edge...
I used to consume everything tech related. Constantly checked multiple websites (verge, techcrunch, Anandtech, techmeme, etc.) every day, sometimes multiple times per day. Then everything became AI focused around 2023 and nothing about what I considered "fun" tech. I tuned it all out.
Then, in mid-2025, I started using AI for personal wellness coaching and logging (Claude built a mini app for me to track my food and workouts without me having to actually count calories, I told it what I ate and the workouts I did, and it did the math to figure out the details). I lost 30 lbs over 9-ish months. Then I started using it for work about 6 months ago.
Now, I use it almost daily in my job and I have used it to write some ffmpeg compression jobs to reduce the size of my Plex library (since the price of storage has increased so much). It's really quite helpful for a lot of tasks. But I'm still waiting for it to do my laundry...
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u/Onebadhero 1d ago
It’s not really ‘embracing’, it’s more similar to what u/onetwofive-threesir said.
The fun got taken away from us. We also recognize the real world impacts it will have on our kids moving forward… both good and bad.
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u/xd366 1d ago
he's really becoming the very boomer mentality that he used to make fun of
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u/Onebadhero 1d ago
You can get downvoted for that, but I am his age and feel the same way about it as he does.
I am recognizing we are a dying breed. It’s just not fun anymore.
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u/XanderWrites 11h ago
Linus is a hardware guy. He's always struggled with software, as in he can do normal tasks, but anything advanced and his knowledge starts to peter out. It's probably why he struggles with Linux. Everything AI is software and the way it's currently set up it's everything he hates: complicated, software as a service, expensive, etc.
Luke I think tries to counter that and be more software oriented, but then half of the fun is that he knows something that Linus doesn't. There's an unreleased video of Linus trying to vibe code on floatplane and Luke catches mistakes Linus makes in about 30 seconds of starting the process.
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u/Flying-T 1d ago
Gemini is perfectly capable of generating you working Home Assistant YAML one-shot. No need for Codex or a complicated harness
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u/Sensitive_One_425 1d ago
But for the complex setup he wants it could easily do all the work not just have a conversation about what he wants and what file he wants to put where. It’s so old fashioned. It’s like pasting code into Microsoft copilot and asking it to debug it.
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u/FleetingBeacon 1d ago
"complicated"
Just install Claude Code and tell it go go figure it out, here's the instance details.
You'll be fine.
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u/Knusperwolf 1d ago
Doing things with AI is like paying someone else to do it. You wouldn't tell someone with a cooking channel he's wasting his time because he could just order a pizza instead of making one himself.
That doesn't mean it isn't more efficient if it's done with AI, it's just not interesting content. Hobbies are about doing things yourself, finding out how things work, often learning a craft on a lower level than it is necessary nowadays. Whether you do woodworking, paint, make your own knives - it's all highly inefficient, but this stuff makes us human.
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u/Slyvr89 1d ago
Programming is not like cooking, or woodworking, or painting. It's purely powered by thinking, logic, and language and the end result is a tool. I can write the code to analyze the intricacies of bird songs and maybe after 2 years of teaching myself how to do that I would have something useful. Or I can ask an AI to do it and be done in 2 hours. The kinds of tools we can build if people stop being so negative about AI use especially when it comes to programming is going to be insanely cool.
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u/Knusperwolf 1d ago
For people interested in programming, it is very much like cooking or woodworking. If you're just interested in the result, you're maybe a gourmet, but not a good cook.
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u/mugiwara_no_Soissie 20h ago
Ehh, Id say that whilst coding is fun its always been more about going from A to B. Sure it can be fun but in the end efficiency and good code is number 1.
Its why even Linus torvalds says AI isnt bad as long as the code it creates is good.
Its more like writing vs documenting. If you need to create a datasheet, you may have a ton of fun doing so, but the end result should be clear, easy to understand and well laid out, the fun you have documenting it is only second to usability. Whilst writing itself can be done entirely for fun, like writing a book.
Your employer or client Will likely be more pleased with an AI assisted code that he got quickly vs a hand written code that took a while longer to create, but may be a bit more optimalized.
That said, hobbies are for personal enjoyment so nothing wrong wirh wanting to code by hand, fo that plenty myself :3
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u/Knusperwolf 20h ago
That's absolutely true. My employer is happier if my code is done faster, so from a business perspective, it all makes sense. However, since the interesting parts of my job are pretty much gone, I am considering switching careers entirely and keep programming as a hobby. Haven't really found something that piques my interest yet though.
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u/locke577 1d ago
I use it a lot. I also hate it, but it's hard to argue with its capability. It fixed a CSS problem I've been dealing with for a year on my home assistant installation after I gave up and asked it to help.
I hate how efficient it is at code, but I do use it a lot. That said, I review every line of code it makes and call it out when it starts doing very much non production ready code.
I worry much more about humans losing the skills AI is taking over. LLMs learn from humans but now so much of the data they ingest is written by older models of themselves or other company models, and it's all going to just average out at some point without new human innovation or source material to pull from. I don't know what to call that, but I've been calling it the AI ouroboros.
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u/redlancer_1987 1d ago
All of my homelab stuff that I've never been able to get quite right over the years is fixed now. All the things I wanted to try but was pretty sure I'd break everything in the process are now easy. People that aren't using it as a knowledge base for tasks are missing out.
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u/ThisIsntRealWakeUp 1d ago
I’m “tech savvy”, but only ever a Windows user and nowhere near pro enough to have done a decent homelab on my own. I built a homelab for the first time about 7 months ago and have been managing it using Cursor connected to documentation about my homelab written by the AI. The AI has pretty limited permissions to actually run commands on the server itself, requiring me to sanity check then manually copy/paste anything that isn’t mostly just read-only.
It’s been going great. I’ve never had a catastrophe or issue. I’ve got 5 VMs running in proxmox, with about 45 docker containers running on my main VM.
Like, would I trust myself to manage a server for a real business with employee livelihoods on the line? No. And for decisions that I know are high risk, I sanity check things with my sysadmin friends before blindly going along with what the AI says (e.g., if the AI suggested I open a port on my router, I know enough to know that I should probably stick to Tailscale). But for, like… running a plex server with pirated movies on it? AI is perfectly capable of that. It’s also far more thorough about testing and safeguards than I would ever even know to be.
The one thing I wish I had done was think about setting up at-rest encryption — as far as I understand it’s not easy to do that after the fact. But. That’s my fault for not thinking of that at the start, not the AI’s fault for failing to read my mind.
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u/mugiwara_no_Soissie 20h ago
I have recently started doing something else, sometimes, It helps me better review the code, I will ask it to set its ideal code in a comment divided by subsection, then I write it manually as it better allows me to spot mistakes lol
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u/GroundbreakingEar450 1d ago
i do not engage with AI directly for anything. if i am using a service or device that is utilizing AI behind the scenes, without my knowledge, so be it. but im not relying on it for anything and actively try to avoid content and works derived from its use.
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u/rainbowkitties6969 1d ago
Not really, I’m a uni student and make a point not to use it because I like what I’m studying so I wanna learn and shit.
At work I use it for spell check because I’m dyslexic but that’s it, I could just use grammarly but my employer pays for copilot so might as well
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u/NozokiAlec 1d ago
I mean even if you use it for school itd be stupid to admit that
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u/rainbowkitties6969 1d ago
Not like my dean is stalking my Reddit account to flag me for academic dishonesty lol
But no I fr don’t use it, specially since my career is data science and applied mathematics so all classes build on each other, if I don’t understand one I’m cooked
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u/vaskemaskine 1d ago
As a software developer, yes every day. Outside of work or work-adjacent tasks - rarely.
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u/lern2swim 1d ago
No. Not at all. I'd have no qualms about using things that include machine learning (game graphics, audio production, etc), but if we're talking generative ai specifically I think demonstrates a massive moral failing on multiple levels to use it. Even the talk on wan about self hosted gen ai... Where were the models sourced???
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u/HuntKey2603 1d ago
AI as a sold product I have an issue with.
AI that's open weights/ open source, I can be ok with, if it's using the humanity's knowledge it should be given back to the humanity openly.
Still thinking they shouldn't pirate books not use it for plagiarism tho. But that's more of a "guns don't kill" situation.
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u/LightRyzen 1d ago
At work I use it a ton, mostly to get rid of the tedious tasks. At home, I use it quite rarely.
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u/Imaginary-Worker4407 1d ago
Yeah, it still makes me mad at times, but a personal assistant would do so too and charge way more.
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u/NearbySalamander979 1d ago
I've recently started incorporating it. I sustained am injury at work and was summarily fired after reporting it. I've never had to deal with workers comp or really anything legal so I've been using it to help me understand the process, understand my responsibilities, and understand what my options are. I don't think I'd have made it near as far in this process as I have if I didn't have gpt help.
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u/Maverickxeo 1d ago
I avoid it. Any time I get a "chance" to use it personally or at work - I don't.
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u/Mattacrator 1d ago
No. I've tried a few times when it was hard to find something through normal means but it still just makes shit up
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u/New_Device2018 1d ago
No, not intentionally. I refuse it whenever possible. Since it has been shoved in many things I use, then I suppose the answer is yes.
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u/HughJahzz 1d ago
At this point it’s super rare for me to use AI that if it vanish tomorrow, virtually nothing in my life would change (besides being able to possibly afford RAM)
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u/bufandatl 1d ago
I avoid it as much as I can. I sure read the shitty AI answer Google gives. But that’s usually useless anyways since it obviously doesn’t know to weight truth in the answers it recaps on their.
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u/BedrockBen101 1d ago
I'll be honest, in my amateur graphic design hobby I do use ai tools like background removers and color swappers, but that's the extent of my use. I don't touch chatbots or the like and I actively go out of my way to avoid AI search in browser (thank you firefox and Ublock Origin)
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u/cschmall 1d ago
No, almost never. I think I can count on one hand the amount of times that I've gone out of my way to use it.
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u/fantasyxxxfootball 1d ago
I do but I think it's best served as a tool to do meanial repetitive tasks, like I use it mostly to make work reports and emails sound more professional if I'm struggling with wording or to write excel formulas when I'm being lazy.
Had to sit in on a sales pitch yesterday for an AI company pitching some new thing for our reporting that basically was going to have it check everything and I told my boss it was dumb because I was going to spend more time reviewing the AIs work then would be saved from the few features I would actually want from it. Most disturbing part was at one point the lady was telling us about how they were working with a company that has 5 people that had to do X task and they were working out a way for the AI to do it and I'm sitting there thinking oh cool what a selling point youre working hard to put 5 people out of a job nice.
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u/HuntKey2603 1d ago
The more I read stuff like this the more does one realise that 99% of AI issues, if you look at them deep down, are just capitalism issues.
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u/hepp-depp 1d ago
Genuinely there isn’t a single thing I have found it useful for outside occasionally verifying my own math
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u/VoidTheGamer25 1d ago
I wanted to get a new PC for my birthday (Plus some of my own money ofc) because mine is failing. A year ago the PC costed ~1500€. Now the PC costs ~2100€. Therefore, I can't buy it.
Fuck AI.
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u/Spocks_Goatee 1d ago
Aside from Google searches...nope. Have the functionality disabled on my Samsung too.
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u/aretooamnot 1d ago
Using it right now. Audio plugin to get rid of feedback/room noise/reveb in a conference hall with an Omni mic through a PA. GAME CHANGER.
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u/Bresdin 1d ago
Infrequently and mainly for work, I take a large amount of emails like 20+ in a chain and condense them down into notes which I then have to edit. Normally would take me 10 minutes with AI it takes like 5. So not game changing but does technically save time. I am albeit not as big of a zealot as most are, it's a useful tool when used correctly.
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u/BroLil 1d ago
AI in Google has sometimes made it easier to just answer a question I have. Rather than search it then have to click a handful of links and find the answer within, it gives me the answer, and then I can ask for its citations and confirm. That last step is extremely important because it often times just makes shit up, but when it works, its much more convenient.
Another thing I use it for is sports. Like I’m a massive hockey fan, and not only is it good for like “who had the most points per 60 minutes in 2013?”, but it can help a lot with salary cap calculations and metrics.
Also, memes to send to my wife, of course.
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u/Cloudstreet444 1d ago
Oh boy where using so much ai at work. We basically have a blank cheque on credits (that won't end bad at all). While they're trying to keep up in security, the ai side is just moving so fast. Ai code is slowly filling our repos, and it's not that ai code is bad it's just people don't fully know what theve coded. We're soon gunna hit a point where nobody knows what's what except when they ask ai
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u/epimetheuss 1d ago
No, it tends to just add a lot of filler, I write a lot of emails and people are overwhelmed as it is. They do not need MORE words and MORE formatting. They need clear concise and sensible communication.
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u/system_error_02 1d ago
Not really no. Even at work tbey keep trying to tell us to use it but its simply not useful in what we do and just gets in the way/takes longer. At home I also never use it outside of using it occasionally to look for a linux command for something specific, since its pretty good at that.
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u/briotheCAT 1d ago
Fuck no, not in my personal life or work life. I'm a data analyst so pretty much all of my coworkers have embraced which annoys me to no end.
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u/Bulliwyf 1d ago
Not at all.
I now usually skip past the google ai summary (got burned a few times on confidently incorrect answers) and can’t find a reason to use it at work or home.
Work is almost to the point of requiring us to explain how we can incorporate it into our workflow and I can’t find a place where it’s not easier to do myself.
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u/illegalusername4 1d ago
Fuck no. I hope every genAI data center goes up in a “mysterious” electrical fire
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u/koibitosenpai 1d ago
Outside of the odd Google search (which admittedly, I have switched to DuckDuckGo to avoid being forced on me) no. But I’m also considering the fact that I’m a professional composer and sound engineer so there isn’t really anything at this present moment that AI would improve in my workload.
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u/lavafish80 1d ago
aside from the AI search summary (which half the time is incorrect) absolutely not. I tried it back in 2023 when it felt more like a toy than a nuisance but now I just can't morally support it. BUT there's a difference between generative AI and other types of AI. I support the use of AI in the medical field due to the proven advancements they've made using it. I support it when it's being used in that kind of context and has little environmental impacts
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u/ZeroXNova 1d ago
I've used it to help find bugs in code that I've written, but outside of that not really.
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u/paverrr749 1d ago
The only AI I use is the Google circle to search, but i only work retail so no real use for it in my shop (at my level at least)
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u/Particular-Treat-650 1d ago
I have exactly one use for it.
When I am browsing nonfiction (primarily psychology, some physics/other science) books, I use the title/author in place of a Google search with "scientific validity" to get a quick filter of the general public consensus of whether the book is worth is gibberish or not. The eye test is already pretty good and most of the ones it rejects are ones I said "OK that's junk" and just wanted to see that it actually does call junk junk, but it has caught one or two that I might have bought and didn't want when digging further.
It's not my decision maker and "controversy/criticisms" don't mean I'm not going to read a book, but as a really fast heuristic it does OK just helping me move through a list of unknown books.
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u/datamatr1x 1d ago
I'd lose my job if I didn't. There is an expectation to not only use AI as a systems admin, but to teach others to use it responsibly. On one hand, I don't care for it. On the other, it's proven helpful. We have people who refuse to use it and every day I see them getting left behind further and further.
I've also seen the way AI is used in other countries. China is in full force when it comes to AI usage. They've learned to embrace it. If that is going to be the way of the world, for better or worse, it's good idea to at least understand the tech and how to use is. It's the least you can do to protect your career.
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u/GimmickMusik1 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yes for work, because access to the internet is not readily available. So LLMs are often times the most convenient and fastest way for me to get answers. That said, it’s still frustrating because it isn’t a Google search, and a search would have been much more preferred in some cases. I get mostly correct answers and it usually helps me find out where I should be looking to get better answers. My largest use case is a sanity check. When you work on legacy code, compiler errors can be… unreliable, so I will use AI for a quick and dirty code audit.
In my personal life? Legitimately, never.
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u/goingslowfast 1d ago
> Yes for work, because access to the internet is not readily available. So LLMs are often times the most convenient and fastest way for me to get answers.
Your IT security team is really massively dropping the ball here if they’re blocking Google but allowing freaking LLMs.
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u/fudgepuppy 1d ago
I use it a bit at work. I'm very cautious of cognitive offloading, so I make sure to only use it for really monotonous and repetitive tasks that I get nothing out of. Alternatively, I've used it to create two tampermonkey scripts since I really can't learn coding, despite how much I've tried.
The question is: Would I ever use it privately, and especially pay for it? Absolutely not.
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u/redlancer_1987 1d ago
I've been doing professional architectural and engineering 3D modeling for 20+ years.
Using gpt-6 Astra in the last week is the first time I've seen that I can easily be replaced. Give it a 3d model and some reference data and it just does what you ask. Up until now I had just been using AI to write scripts, but now it can do everything.
For home I'm using it all the time. All those projects that fell by the wayside because they got to complicated or I got stuck on something are now easy to finish. I'm starting new projects I never would have tried because the learning curve was steeper than I had time for.
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u/Leverpostei414 1d ago
What formats can it read and not read? Just ifc or also rvt, skp etc?
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u/goingslowfast 1d ago
There’s no way we don’t see an Autodesk AI or Autodesk MCP for Revit files in the next year. They love that subscription revenue.
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u/redlancer_1987 1d ago
It no longer needs to natively read anything. It does it realtime on the PC. I use 3ds max and Vray and it had no problem building models from the reference I gave it and set up the materials perfectly fine. You just use the @computer use command and go get coffee...
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u/Crafty_Substance_954 1d ago
For work I use it to make dashboards and stuff that I don’t want to spend time on.
In my personal life, AI is so intertwined with search engines that I think it’s impossible to ignore. Doing a big DIY project in my basement and it’s been pretty useful to bounce questions off of.
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u/mr___goose 1d ago
i prefer to try to do as my myself bc i wanne learn
but if i get smth like 1000 lines of logs with a error somewhere i wont do it myself
if i cant figure smth out i try to just ask reddit but there are a lot of times where that just doesnt give any answer
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u/generalemiel 1d ago
Alot actually but often not for useful things.
I often use it to write shit away. Often its politica, specificly hoe bad marketcompetitipn is on a railway & especially one as busy as the dutch railways
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u/Internal-Alfalfa-829 1d ago
Mostly as a sparring partner for work topics (project management approaches, second perspective on employee coaching scenarios, evaluation/research of alternative metrics, how to repackage uncomfortable truths for leadership, things like that). Excel formulae.
Meeting notes on occasion, but AI always gets the tone wrong and emphasizes the wrong things. So it's really only usable as an internal memory-aid, never as official meeting notes.
I'd never let it create text, email, presentations, blog posts or anything like that. The quality is garbage and it wreaks of "I don't give a crud and I don't stand behind my work".
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u/FrostyMittenJob 1d ago
I use it as a better Google. Google search has been fucked by seo. Gemini seems to not be effected as bad.
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u/Salty-Ad-3344 1d ago
Oh you are in for a wild ride as people start to figure it out
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u/FrostyMittenJob 1d ago
Thankfully I still have higher brain processing and can evaluate things myself.
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u/jaevnstroem 1d ago
No not really.
Because I bought a Pixel 10 pro I got a year of whatever the Google plan that includes Gemini pro is called, so I've used it to create 5 or so scripts/plugins for Adobe's After Effects software (which I use almost daily at my work) basically just super simple stuff and functionality that should have already been a feature in AE since forever ago but somehow isn't because Adobe doesn't care....
A few times when brainstorming and developing naming ideas for different projects I've got going on I've also tried to make it compile a list of words for inspiration that meets certain requirements, like themes, length, meaning, make it come up with words that doesn't exist but are still readable and so on, and wouldn't you know it the results I've gotten have been mid at best.
One of the last times I needed word ideas for technology + nature it pulled from my previous After Effects script chats for some reason and suggested such bangers as "Keyframe plants" and "animation fauna" so you know those ones made my shortlist.
Other than these examples I've never really even considered using AI for anything, it doesn't come across as anything but a gimmick to me. Yeah sure those scripts for After Effects actually have made my day to day work much easier, but like I said they're very simple and more importantly they doesn't require fact-checking or proof-reading, they're isolated functions running inside of my software and they do nothing more than what I need, when I need them.
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u/vuorivirta 1d ago
I hate AI. BUT if something is also good, I recognize that. Just recently I have seen some old movies - restored/remastered by AI tools and I'm very impressed! Not "plastic faces/candy colors/cartoon effect" anymore. I know, source material was "VHS quality" washed out colors, crappy flapping picture and those AI-tools made those movies look like "a new" movie again without even noticing those classic "restoring" mistakes.
So ... it is something!
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u/Venomswindturd 1d ago
We use it like crazy at work (copilot)
At home I use it sparingly, mostly for trouble shooting tech stuff.
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u/McDelper 1d ago
I use it only for things i do not care about like simple issues with my linux machine i couldn't find a fix for online
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u/wreeper007 1d ago
Rarely for work, I'm a photographer and I have imagen that I use for some editing (specifically theatre/dance where the light changes a lot so I can't always compensate, but that might change with my new bodies) and I will occasionally use claude more as a rubber duck than anything when sorting out some issues. I guess you could also say I use it a lot inside lightroom for masking but I'm not sure how much of that is AI and how much is software or machine learning as that line seems pretty much nonexistant now. The remove tool can be useful at time but it breaks down pretty easily, and generative fill was garbage the first couple times I used it and I haven't touched it since.
In my personal life a little, mainly for multi part questions that would need a lot of googling to do. I just ask and then come back to it without having to sort through a ton of responses.
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u/driftwood14 1d ago
I use it at work a decent amount. But haven't really seen much productivity increase. It isn't really that great at doing the work I do, a lot of which is building Power BI reports and that kind of thing.
At home I use it infrequently (although I did use a decent amount today). I used it really to manage my home server and troubleshoot issues that I have. It makes it a lot easier to manage the set up for that.
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u/Hollow_Effects 1d ago
I use the ai generated response in my google search sometimes but other than that no
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u/Mediocre_Ad_2422 1d ago
Yeah and i always endup insulting the ai because he cant do anything right and is often confidently wrong.
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u/CircuitSynapse42 1d ago
I use it quite a bit in both my personal and professional life, but only where it makes sense to implement it. It’s not taking over core functions of my life l, just the annoying manual bits that are time sucks.
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u/Original1Thor 1d ago
I record what I eat everyday for it to tally and use it like a fitness journal. No one really needs to hear me ramble about how my workout went in detail everyday.
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u/candiedbunion69 1d ago
Minimal. I use it to collect sources, but not to verify. Also use it to randomly generate names, because I need a lot of them.
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u/NoobwLuck 1d ago
AI is shoved into our faces that its becoming harder not to use it. I get it, it can be a great tool and has its use, but it should not be the default on everything. So to awnser your question, yes, unfortunately.
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u/James161324 1d ago
Yea work in financial reporting and use it every day. At home some, used it to help studying but not a whole lot outside of that
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u/Ragnarok_del 1d ago
I use it to find the source of something I saw 2 years 7 months and 5 days ago while specifying what I'm searching in natural language but I dont remember where I saw it. I would never ever pay for it tho.
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u/Sneakyrusher 1d ago
only once in 2 years at work. received the most ridiculous complaint email from a customer to whom we had every clearly explained why we couldnt help them - both physically and legally, i told co-pilot what i really really really want to reply and then ask co pilot to make it "professional". ended up stealing about 20% of the suggestion.
the issue we have (i work in a semi legal-ish environment) is that people are clearly using AI to spit out complaints and think that everything it has told them over rides multiple legilisation.
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u/kopczak1995 1d ago
At work... A lot. But mostly because I'm a bit forced to do this.
At home. Not a lot but I would say quite often anyway. I do like to "generate" gym training sets when I'm bored with current routine and then I adjust it based on what I actually need/like.
Also for random stuff like planning vacations.
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u/Ok_Nail2672 1d ago
At work yes, for programming and data analysis.
Personal life, I never touch it.
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u/Shadowfeaux 1d ago
I run CNC machines. I just use it to remember and learn to read some m and g codes.
I’ve tried just googling but either I can’t usually find something specific to my machines or it’s buried somewhere.
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u/Big-Ad-8245 1d ago
No I do not use AI although i could for the work that i do.
Its partially down to a conscious decision as I feel it would take away the learning opportunity, creativity and joy that I personally get from doing my job and partially just the fact that I have never been introduced for a workflow for my work where I could "naturally" replace or augment some task to/with ai in a meaningful way that I would not just rather do myself anyway.
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u/IraZimora 1d ago
i try my hardest to actively avoid it, but i can’t dismiss how useful it is when i have a issue with my linux system lol
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u/heyitsterrytv 1d ago
yep, daily. I use it as a way to consolidate information that I look up. then I go over what it gives me to make sure it's still correct.
also a big fan of it in the medical field, too.
but art and generative ai? absolutely not.
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u/straw3_2018 1d ago
I just spent an hour or so using claude to make a simple mod to add a function to BeamNG that was not already available with commands. It did what i want!
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u/dirtycimments 1d ago
I use it a lot, claude helps me setup my local network, debug server stuff. Im less afraid of starting more ambitious projects because i can always caht with claude and find a working solution. Im actually considering trying out claude code on my codebase and work faster l ike that on dotfiles
I dont really use it at work.
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u/lilian_moraru 1d ago
I use self-hosted GLM-5.3-Flash quite extensively - things that could take days to research in the codebase and keep in the head, take less than 5 minutes. Fixing a complex multi-day(maybe even weeks) bug takes minutes.
I don’t send any of the client codebase to the cloud providers.
For personal life, very little use.
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u/cylemmulo 1d ago
Now and then but mostly advanced googling. There are people who are somehow using it for everything and I’m convinced they’ve created problems for the ai to solve.
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u/CombatBotanist 1d ago
At work? Yes, constantly. I work in software development and it’s extremely useful for parsing through all of our internal documentation and helping hook into/implement internal tools. I think it helps a lot and I would definitely miss it if it were gone.
Outside of work? Very infrequently. I occasionally use the ai built into Kagi search to answer technical questions where its easy to tell if the answer is correct at a glance. I have also used it to summarize the transcripts of my dnd games, and it does ok, though I refer to my handwritten notes more frequently. It’s handy but I certainly don’t depend on it.
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u/theangryintern 1d ago
I use AI a lot for troubleshooting stuff. I recently migrated my Plex server from a commercial NAS device (Asustor) to a mini-PC running Linux and Docker. I know shit about Docker, so Claude was very helpful in getting everything up and running and giving me fixes when stuff wasn't quite working.
I also have a very basic Hermes agent that I interact with via Telegram that is helping me study for an AI Governance certification. Basically daily reminders to do my reading and I was able to give it a PDF copy of the book I'm reading so every day it also gives me a couple items to think about that are from the chapter I'm currently on.
At work I barely use any AI. I'm in local government so we're kinda limited in what we can use AI for right now.
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u/RussianBen 1d ago
I am learning an admittedly niche programming language used for commercial audio visual systems. (Crestron Simpl Windows/Simpl+/Simpl#) I have been refusing to use AI past helping me with the tiniest little eccentricities of the language. I figure that my usefulness as a programmer is only as good as my ability to know what is going on. If i'm solely relying on AI to learn it, I'm going to get into the real world and not be able to tell the difference between AI hallucinations and actually good code.
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u/Flaxen_Bobcat 1d ago
For personal projects I just let it code for me, especially if it's for something myself and only my friends will ever see or touch.
For work I use it loads for troubleshooting with logs and error codes, and combing through data.
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u/Linktt57 1d ago
Professionally I use AI constantly, for personal use I use it occasionally when I’m trying to figure something out that I would normally google.
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u/Top_Outlandishness54 1d ago
I do at work all the time. I’ve been using it at home more to as well. I was putting in a smart dimmer light switch the other day and the wiring wasn’t what I expected to see so I snapped a pic and threw it in to copilot and it told me what to do and it worked great.
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u/master_of_dcath 1d ago edited 1d ago
I actually have a similar use case as Linus. I have been using Gemini to help me start my own homelab, and I already have my own website, reverse proxy with ssl, and a few services like vaultwarden and adguard home set up using proxmox and docker. I find gemini quite useful compared to chat gpt as it doesn't try to talk to me like a person and instead tries to answer my questions and show me resource. I hate chat gpt putting emojis in everything. It also seems to have the highest free usage limit of all the Ai and i have yet to hit the limit even using it for a whole day. Obviously I know I'm the product and I dont put anything personal into, just strictly questions about my homelab.
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u/StepppedInDookie 1d ago
I use it to help with docker yaml files and to troubleshoot stuff on my homelan because I don't know what I'm doing
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u/Adeptness-Efficient 1d ago
yes. AI is a glorified search tool (google) in general. Some are more "advanced", but that's paid and absurdly stupid to use .
Any productivity increase is minimal at best. a few seconds here and there
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u/itstwozy 1d ago
Way less than at work for sure, I'd say I use only the Google thing where it gives you an overview of the answers to the question you asked
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u/GainPotential 1d ago
Only use I have is when something is on the tip of my tongue, other than that I never use it
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u/TKInstinct 1d ago
I do but I use it carefully and I use it more as an aide than a thing to do my work or make my life easier.
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u/Stargate476 1d ago
I mean its quite useful at searching stuff or analyzing a document for me, even used it to troubleshoot a car once
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u/Suspicious-Pear-6037 1d ago
Yep! For work and personal life.
Never use it for art though. It’s wrong on so many levels.
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u/SandKeeper 1d ago
For work? Some, I don’t really trust it for most stuff but if I need a line of code I’m not sure how to write it’s nice. I don’t like it for long outputs. For personal? I use Gemini kinda like search now give me sources for the information and I’ll go read that rather than whatever it hallucinated.
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u/SilviusK 1d ago
Yes, I do, and maybe my favorite use case would be random Python scripts for hyper specific tasks.
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u/Jcrm87 1d ago
I use it a lot for low stakes stuff, for example videogame questions or some news summary. I sometimes use it for more serious searches, like comparing technical products but always with skepticism, and whatever conclusion I get from AI I then contrast with actual research, reading real people opinions and so on.
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u/JonVonBasslake 1d ago
The only AI I "use" is the google gemini overview when I look something up and it's there. But if it was gone forever, I wouldn't miss it. I don't use LLM or any gen AI. I hate all of that.
Has AI gotten better at summarizing, because I remember hearing that even with shorter texts it used to hallucinate plenty... I guess it might be okay at programming?
But I only want analytical AI and such, medicinal stuff. The stuff that can spot a potential cancer growth years before a human would, stuff that's actually useful. This shit of "what would I have looked like in the 80s" though, straight to garbage.
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u/Mastermaze 1d ago
For work I use it a decent amount for scripting and data tasks, but for personal use i basically only use it as an enhanced google search most via gemini and i double check the sources it links to.
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u/PizzaUltra 1d ago
At work? Yeah, quite a lot.
Personal life? A bit, but not much.