To use a friends example, from a few years ago.

He once spent like, two weeks in his downtime at his work programming, with limited experience other than being generally computer savvy, a script that automated part of his printing companies production pipeline. I think it was the bit where the design staff handover the finished .pdf (or whatever it is) and then there's essentially a manual process of preparing that for print. Kind of like audio mastering.

But they were printing hundreds of virtually identical real estate signs, so the settings were identical, and the output identical.

He calculated it out, it ended up saving the company like 6-10 manhours a week or something, which is kind of ludicrous, really, for a couple weeks work. He got a promotion from this, and then process management became his entire role.

Now, he can get that exact script made in the time it takes his coffee to brew.

A professional programmer could also have whipped it up in probably an hour. But they don't employ programmers, why would they, they're a printing company. And the programmer needs to understand being a printing company more than he needs to be a programmer, because otherwise he's got no idea where the inefficiencies are or what needs human input.

You could get someone to come out and audit the thing, and set up a bunch of bespoke stuff but then if it breaks you gotta call them, and this concept as a business just doesn't really exist at the scale we're talking. You need to be big enough to justify having a software team on site to justify custom software.

But someone in the business who knows the processes, and also knows enough about computers to be able to accurately tell Claude what to do, and to look over the code and outputs and properly test it, can quite easily start saving their business hundreds of manhours over a matter of days.

And this is like... just the first one that comes to mind in a professional environment. I don't work in professional environments like this but I'm doing the same stuff with em for art and music. I've been testing out working with raspberry pis to make custom midi controllers, and I can make changes to the firmware off the cuff, on the fly. I can just have a vague idea in my head and have it be the output. Like, a custom midi controller is a project that would have taken the better half of a year for me to do five years ago, and it would have consumed so much of my free time. Now its like, something I put together after work in a couple days.

I am genuinely considering getting into installing home automation setups for people now because LLMs just automate all the awful, tedious, repetitive programming. You just get everything on the network and tell it to find it all and how you want it configured and it's just done, I've done it more than once it basically just works. I can get firmware updates to a swarm of LED controllers by messaging my CLI a single sentence (I mean I have safeguards in place but a sentence is all the instruction it needs) That used to be a manual process of type in IP Address, log in, click the upload box, select the file, wait etc. Again, if you were a proficient programmer, you could manually batch this process. But you'll likely need to do an update like this maybe once per device if ever.

I think, what LLMs are ultimately good for, is letting people who are "good with computers" start having a lot more power over their machines without having to learn how to program. I've been deep in computers my entire life, building, setting up, networking, multiple OSes, dual-booting, virus cleaning back in the day, all the good stuff, I just never learnt programming. I learnt guitar instead lol. But now I have the ability to get my computers to do what I always knew they could, I just didn't have the time to learn.