I could spend a lot more than $1000/month, because cloud services are a non-starter.
It seems to me that if you’re going to use something like this to its real potential, it has to be integrated into your habitual ways of doing things. You have to use it all the time. It’s too jarring to have to worry about whether it’s trustworthy, or to “code switch” because you can’t use it for some reason[1].
I can’t imagine integrating any of those things into my normal, day to day routine unless the content of what I was doing were, in normal course, exposed only to me. Which in practice means locally hosted. Which would be prohibitively expensive even if it were possible.
This is actually the same reason I rarely customize applications very much. It’s too jarring when I get onto another machine and have to use the vanilla version.
I can’t imagine integrating any of those things into my normal, day to day
routine unless the content of what I was doing were, in normal course,
exposed only to me.
I’ve had something like this issue. The places I most want to use LLMs are for work tasks like “refactor this terribleness to not be crap”, or “find the part of this codebase that is responsible for X”, or “fill out this pointless paperwork for me”; but I’m not going to upload my employer’s data to an LLM provider. Also, if you’re in tech, you might want to apply for a job at an AI company. If so, then anything you type into their LLM is potentially exposed to whoever is judging that application. Even if you’re not doing anything questionable, you still have to spend attention on HR-proofing it.
(I’m sure privacy policies are a thing. Have you read them? I have not. I could fix that, but that is also an attention cost, and you have to trust that the policy will be honored when it matters)
The places where exposing things to the LLM provider is a non-issue (e.g. boilerplate), I mostly don’t need help with and mostly do better than the LLM does.
I think my productivity at work would be most dramatically increased not by auto-completing my code (although that too would be nice) but rather by reading all the company Confluence pages and providing short summaries in plain language, connecting together information that is split into dozens of unconnected pieces, each of them written in a different place and often requiring different access rights. Maybe even more by reading all the existing code and configuration files, and updating the documentation with something that is actually true and can be interpreted unambiguously.
That’s a great idea… that would get me fired at my current job (security reasons). :D
I hope you have that automated, because you will probably want to refresh the exports in a few months, but even if you did it manually I believe the ability to get instant answers is worth it.
Yeah, I haven’t got it automated yet. Someday I’ll have the time.
Another place I did this was with the mountain of onboarding docs I got. Now I can just ask Claude stuff like “how early do I have to request time off and who do I contact?” or “What’s my dental insurance deductible?”
I could spend a lot more than $1000/month, because cloud services are a non-starter.
It seems to me that if you’re going to use something like this to its real potential, it has to be integrated into your habitual ways of doing things. You have to use it all the time. It’s too jarring to have to worry about whether it’s trustworthy, or to “code switch” because you can’t use it for some reason[1].
I can’t imagine integrating any of those things into my normal, day to day routine unless the content of what I was doing were, in normal course, exposed only to me. Which in practice means locally hosted. Which would be prohibitively expensive even if it were possible.
This is actually the same reason I rarely customize applications very much. It’s too jarring when I get onto another machine and have to use the vanilla version.
I’ve had something like this issue. The places I most want to use LLMs are for work tasks like “refactor this terribleness to not be crap”, or “find the part of this codebase that is responsible for X”, or “fill out this pointless paperwork for me”; but I’m not going to upload my employer’s data to an LLM provider. Also, if you’re in tech, you might want to apply for a job at an AI company. If so, then anything you type into their LLM is potentially exposed to whoever is judging that application. Even if you’re not doing anything questionable, you still have to spend attention on HR-proofing it.
(I’m sure privacy policies are a thing. Have you read them? I have not. I could fix that, but that is also an attention cost, and you have to trust that the policy will be honored when it matters)
The places where exposing things to the LLM provider is a non-issue (e.g. boilerplate), I mostly don’t need help with and mostly do better than the LLM does.
(...for now)
I think my productivity at work would be most dramatically increased not by auto-completing my code (although that too would be nice) but rather by reading all the company Confluence pages and providing short summaries in plain language, connecting together information that is split into dozens of unconnected pieces, each of them written in a different place and often requiring different access rights. Maybe even more by reading all the existing code and configuration files, and updating the documentation with something that is actually true and can be interpreted unambiguously.
I just started a new job and I’ve been exporting Confluence pages to PDF and putting them in a Claude project so I can just ask Claude stuff.
That’s a great idea… that would get me fired at my current job (security reasons). :D
I hope you have that automated, because you will probably want to refresh the exports in a few months, but even if you did it manually I believe the ability to get instant answers is worth it.
Yeah, I haven’t got it automated yet. Someday I’ll have the time.
Another place I did this was with the mountain of onboarding docs I got. Now I can just ask Claude stuff like “how early do I have to request time off and who do I contact?” or “What’s my dental insurance deductible?”