this post was submitted on 19 May 2026
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Chapotraphouse
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I used Gemini the other day for the second or third time ever. I asked it to reference the 2021 IPC (internat'l plumbing code) and lay out a mocked up bathroom that I am remodeling in the next two weeks. I hate to say it, but it nailed the layout. It followed ADA rules to a tee. It laid out my underground work, and gave me a take off list that was a couple fittings short of my written list. It priced out fittings, pipe, and fixtures. The only thing it couldn't do for me was estimate my time to work everything.
I won't use it except in very rare circumstances but anecdotally it seemed to handle taking a known ruleset (plumbing code) and producing something off of it decently well. It's even drew up my layout in ASCII. I attempted this a couple years back with the 2018 IPC and it fell on its own face trying to layout then.
I'm not sure what my point is here, at any rate.
I think there's a lot of utility for these things and people on here are frequently piss drunk on their own ideology regarding how actually useful they are, but at the same time I wouldn't say it's worth the massive resource cost needed to sustain it
that's my take on the current state of LLMs, obviously they used to be even worse tho
I think in their current state they could definitely save a lot of people a lot of work i.e. your example with plumbing, as long as they're either somehow coded to prevent fucked up bullshit that goes against building regulations, or as long as people are trained/aware enough to look over and fix the results
Despite my opinion of AI there are some use cases for it. I used to be one of those aforementioned piss drunk ideology guys. Im certainly not a convert, but im sort of coming around to the idea that there can be use cases for it, but like you said the resource abuse it requires to make Will Smith eat spaghetti is a travesty.
I think it's pretty obvious there are at least some valid uses for it, like even if it just does simple customer service stuff (before escalating to an actual person) I'm sure it'd save a lot of labor and also people actually being abused by mad hogs
but a lot of the "uses for it" it's also pretty obvious (to me, a total expert who definitely is not a layman when it comes to computers) were also solved forever ago and without token nonsense. Like my only interaction with the Spotify AI stuff so far has been to try to make playlists where it doesn't play songs I've heard before. But I am almost 100% certain "make a playlist with only new plays" was something we could have done with one one millionth the energy in like, 1990