Technology

it was closed because it's the same question that was asked 20 other times, and all the solutions don't actually work.

This has absolutely been my experience as well, yeah. I rarely go straight to LLMs first but sometimes I'm not comfortable with simply posting my problem on Reddit and waiting (or posting on Lemmy and waiting forever lol), since it isn't always that simple or convenient to first anonymize data before getting public help, nor do people even always reply, leaving me back to square one with time wasted. I am by far the techiest person in my company (and I barely know anything relative to full-time programmers), so there sure isn't anyone at work who I could ask for help, haha.

I don't go to LLMs often, and they sure messed up a lot even just 2 years ago, but they've come an impressively long way from the unintelligible-text and six-fingers era (despite still occasionally messing up nowadays) and have legitimately optimized my formulae dramatically in both function and legibility, such as by showing me LET() that I didn't even know existed. While I've been meaning to take an online course on spreadsheets and just haven't gotten around to it yet, I try to learn from how the model did XYZ right away but it's nice to have a personal, on-demand tutor, as long as you're always aware of the fact that what it says could be garbage, despite it speaking so confidently. I think for actual, entire vibe-coded products, it's much harder to learn what the heck it's doing versus just simple one-liners. Anyway, on-device and FOSS LLMs make for better compromises, I think, though their quality is noticeably poorer.

The reason I try to avoid "AI" use is not The Dumbening™ but because of the ecological impact, yet I contend that spending hours and hours trying to traditionally solve a problem in frustration is also harmful in its own ways... It's a decent tool of last resort and the Stupids are merely the ones treating it as a line of first defense against everything.