Ask HN: How are you using LLMs?
4 points by WheelsAtLarge 4 hours ago | 5 comments
I like to ask every so often to see what new uses there are.

Here's what I do daily:

Writing Assistance: I use LLMs to help me write emails, reports, and even creative writing pieces. I give it an outline, and it helps me generate text. I edit the LLM output.

Coding Assistance: to help me write batch and PowerShell scripts.

Summarization: to summarize long articles or documents, saving me time.

Language Translation: I write in English, and it translates to Spanish.

Recipe Ideas: I use them to come up with recipe ideas based on the ingredients I have at home.

How do you use them?

  • seccode 4 hours ago |
    Contract law research
  • extropian 3 hours ago |
    Recently, I've been enjoying just talking and brainstorming with Claude. It feels almost like talking to a really smart friend, and that hasn't been replicated by any other model.

    It's a shame, because GPT-4o, despite being higher on the leaderboards should've been able to do the same, but it's not even close how robotic and LLM-esque(?) the conversations feel, compared to Claude.

  • binary_slinger 3 hours ago |
    Input: Full-text notes

    Output: outline of slides for ppt, using pandoc

  • morkalork 2 hours ago |
    Recall aid. You can describe a thing, historical event, concepts, whatever in very broad terms and it'll narrow it down and figure out almost instantly compared to the black hole that is tossing completely wrong keywords into google and getting nowhere.
  • keiferski an hour ago |
    I use them the most time as a way to check for “unknown unknowns.” For example, I’ll tell it that I have an idea about X, and to tell me if there are any similar concepts in existence, books about similar concepts, what some flaws in this idea might be, and so on. Google used to be helpful for tasks like this but is increasingly unhelpful.