One of the interesting things I've noticed is that the best experiences I've had with AI are with simple applications that don't do much to get in the way of the model, e.g. chatgpt and cursor/windsurf.

I'm hopeful that as devs figure out how to build better apps with AI we'll have have more and more "cursor moments" in other areas in our lives

> This demo uses AI to read emails instead of write them

LLMs are so good at summarizing that I should basically only ever read one email—from the AI:

You received 2 emails today that need your direct reply from X and Y. 1 is still outstanding from two days ago, _would you like to send an acknowledgment_? You received 6 emails from newsletters you didn’t sign up for but were enrolled after you bought something _do you want to unsubscribe from all of them_ (_make this a permanent rule_).

I enjoy Claude as a general purpose "let's talk about this niche thing" chat bot, or for general ideation. Extracting structured data from videos (via Gemini) is quite useful as well, though to be fair it's not a super frequent use case for me.

That said, coding and engineering is by far the most common usecase I have for gen AI.

I think the other application besides code copiloting that is already extremely useful is RAG-based information discovery a la Notion AI. This is already a giant improvement over "search google docs, and slack, and confluence, and jira, and ...".

Just integrated search over all the various systems at a company was an improvement that did not require LLMs, but I also really like the back and forth chat interface for this.

I wonder sometime if this is why there is such an enthusiasm gap over AI between tech people and the general public. It's not just that your average person can't program; it's that they don't even conceptually understand why programming could unlock.

The e-mail agent example is so good that it makes everything else I’ve seen and used pointless by comparison. I wonder why nobody’s done it that way yet.

Have you ever been cooking and asked Siri to set a timer? That's basically the most used AI feature outside of "coding" I can think of.

I find that ChatGPT o3 (and the other advanced reasoning models) are decently good at answering questions with a "but".

Google is great at things like "Top 10 best rated movies of 2024", because people make lists of that sort of thing obsessively.

But Google is far less good at queries like "Which movies look visually beautiful but have been critically panned?". For that sort of thing I have far more luck with chatgpt because it's much less of a standard "top 10" list.

I like perplexity when I need a quick overview of a topic with references to relevant published studies. I often use it when researching what the current research says on parenting questions or education. It's not perfect but because the answers link to the relevant studies it's a good way to get a quick overview of research on a given topic

I really like my speech-to-text program, and I find using ChatGPT to look up things and answer questions is a much superior experience to Google, but otherwise, I completely agree with you.

Companies see that AI is a buzzword that means your stock goes up. So they start looking at it as an answer to the question: "How can I make my stock go up?" instead of "How can I create a better product", and then let the stock go up from creating a better product.

Honestly I don't even enjoy coding AI features. The only value I get out of AI is translation (which I take with a grain of salt because I don't know the other language and can't spot hallucinations, but it's the best tool I have), and shitposting (e.g. having chatGPT write funny stories about my friends and sending it to them for a laugh). I can't say there's an actual productive use case for me personally.

garmin wants me to pay for some gen-ai workout messages on connect plus. Its the most absurd AI slop of all. Same with strava. I workout for mental relaxation and i just hate this AI stuff being crammed in there.

Atleast clippy was kind of cute.

> Auto completing a sentence for the next word in Gmail/iMessage is one example

Interestingly, I despise that feature. It breaks the flow of what is actually a very simple task. Now I'm reading, reconsidering if the offered thing is the same thing I wanted over and over again.

The fact that I know this and spend time repeatedly disabling the damned things is awfully tiresome (but my fault for not paying for my own email etc etc)

> I’m actually having a really hard time thinking of an AI feature other than coding AI feature that I actually enjoy.

If you attend a lot of meetings, having an AI note-taker take notes for you and generate a structured summary, follow-up email, to-do list, and more will be an absolute game changer.

(Disclaimer, I'm the CTO of Leexi, an AI note-taker)