A lot of what we take for granted in software now days was once considered “AI”. Every NPC that follows your character in a video game while dynamically accounting for obstacles and terrain features uses the “A* algorithm” which is commonly taught in college courses on “AI”. Gmail sorting spam from non-spam (and not really all that well, honestly)? That’s “AI”. The first version of Google’s search algorithm was also “AI”.

If you’re asking about LLMs, none. Zero. Zip. Nada. Not a goddamned one. LLMs are a scam that need to die in a fire.

I don’t think there’s many consumer use cases for things like LLMs but highly focused, specialized models seem useful. Like protein folding, identifying promising medication, or finding patterns in giant scientific datasets.

I tried Whisper+ voice-to-text this week.

Uses a downloaded 250MB model from Hugging-Face, and processes voice completely offline.

The accuracy is 100% for known words, so far.

For transcribing texts, messages and diary entries.

* I’d be interested to know if it has a large power drain per use.

The only AI tool I’ve found actually useful and reliable is AI denoise for photo editing.

I used GPT to help me plan a 2 week long road trip with my family. It was pretty fucking awesome at finding cool places to stop and activities for my kids to do.

It definitely made some stupid ass suggestions that would have routed us far off our course, or suggested stopping at places 15 minutes into our trip, but sifting through the slop was still a lot quicker than doing all of the research myself.

I also use GPT to make birthday cards. Have it generate an image of some kind of inside joke etc. I used to do these by hand, and this makes it way quicker.

I also use it at work for sending out communications and stuff. It can take the information I have and format it and professionalize it really quick.

I also use it for Powershell scripting here and there, but it does some really wacky stuff sometimes that I have to go in and fix. Or it halucinates entire modules that don’t exist and when I point it out it’s like “good catch! That doesn’t exist!” and it always gives me a little chuckle. My rule with AI and Powershell is that I don’t ask it to do things that I don’t already know how to do. I like to learn things and be good at my job, but I don’t mind using GPT to help with some of the busy work.

None

I run LLMs locally for scripting, ADD brainstorming/organization, automation, pseudo editors and all sorts of stuff, as they’re crazy good for the size now.

I think my favorites are Nemotron 49B (for STEM), Qwen3 finetunes (for code), some esoteric 2.5 finetunes (for writing), and Jamba 52B (for analysis, RAG, chat, long context, this one is very underrated). They all fit in 24GB. And before anyone asks, I know they’re unreliable, yes. But they are self hosted and tools that work for me.

I could run GLM 4.5 offloaded with a bit more RAM…

The one that the other department tried, and which failed to meet expectations dramatically. Gave management a healthy dose of reality on “AI”.

DeepL for translation. It’s not perfect but it feels so much better than those associated w/ search engines.

My CRM system at work has what called “Genius AI” integrated into it. When customer service reps receive calls that require site visits the AI auto fills the work ticket using the phone conversation adds in contact name and numbers and even puts a brief description of what service they require. The AI also transcribes our calls into text to be able to refer back to or get caught up on a job when someone is out sick. It wasnt Iife changing it wasnt forced but as a simple aid it makes life a bit easier.

Copilot in VScode is something you’d have to tear out of my cold, dead hands. Pressing Tab to auto complete is so useful. I use the GPT 4.1 model or whatever it is called. I tried Gemini but for some reason it’s complete ass when doing code. Android Studio Gemini is worse than the free tier on the website.

However, I’ve found the Gemini Pro model on the website is incredibly good for information assistance. To give an idea of my current uses, I have two chats pinned on it: fact checking and programming advice. I use the former for general research that would take more than a few minutes of Googling but need an answer now, and the latter for brainstorming code design or technical tutorials (recently had it help me set up a VM in WSL).

One tool I wish I could use is ElevenLabs. Had a friend on the free tier of it make some really cool and convincing voice lines (I forgot what character it was) a long time ago. Looks easy to use too. I can’t justify spending money just to play with it but if I had a purpose for it, I would.

I use NovelAI to play dynamic RPG stories for my personal use, and have several world settings all prepped with characters, items, some basic rolling rules (which don’t always work). Whatever mood I am in there is a setting to explore or a plot line to develop. I don’t plan on publishing them or profiting off of them in any way other than my own amusement. NovelAI also has an image generator explicitly not trained on licensed material that I use to make images to focus on while playing the RPGs

I use copilot to walk me through quests in MMOs where the guides are vague or expecting a certain degree of game familiarity, as well as to estimate cooking time for meats, and reorganizing my resume to match AI screeners

I used to use DungeonAI for the same RPG purposes but they violated customer privacy so they can eat all the dicks

I’ve enjoyed messing with Perplexity and Duck AI.

Supermaven code autocomplete in vscode is really nice