Original Reddit post

I’m writing this post because over the last few months I’ve been increasingly asking myself whether AI is a tool that’s truly useful, stable, and usable for doing actually useful things. I want to make one thing clear right away: I’m hyped too about the many new things being released every day—new LLMs, new tools. I use it practically every day. But more and more often I find myself asking: does it really help me? I want to make two distinctions: everyday use and work-related use. In my case, as a software developer, I’m deeply involved in it and I’m basically forced to stay informed about what the market is offering. Everyday use: • Do I need specific information? It works well: it replies immediately, sends images, links, documents. In a moment I save myself useless Google searches; I don’t have to open sites full of ads that, before giving you an answer, make you read endless paragraphs telling you some never-ending story. • Do I ask something more niche? Who knows if the answer is correct. You start asking “are you sure?” and it always replies “you’re right! I was completely wrong and you’re right.” What am I supposed to do with a tool that always agrees with me? Inflate my ego because I have a model that gives me approximate answers and convinces me of things that might not even be true? Use at work: Let’s analyze tools like Antigravity, n8n, Openclaw. Premise: I’m speaking from my own experience—I could be using them wrong, using the wrong prompts, the wrong models, I could be doing everything wrong. I’m here to ask for advice. • Antigravity: I use it to create small web apps and websites; I often interface with Supabase or similar tools. Sometimes I wonder how it manages to write certain things in the code—it feels very approximate. Poorly formatted code, poorly written code (sure, it works, but…) who maintains it afterward? Who fixes it if there are problems solved with copy-and-paste solutions from Stack Overflow? • n8n: I installed it, opened it, and asked myself: what can I use something like this for? (Stupid examples, but this is what I see on YouTube.) To read my emails and send me a report by message? Okay, it works—but what do I need it for? To pull out a list of emails to contact for my brand-new marketing agency? Okay, it works—but what do I need it for? To automatically create a workflow that does who-knows-what amazing, mind-blowing thing that’s sold in YouTube videos along with a course? Okay, it works—but what do I need it for? • Openclaw (let’s set aside the privacy discussion, which on its own already makes me think it’s not a secure tool): I’m convinced it’s cool to have an AI agent that does things on its own for you, but the point is: do I actually need it to do those things? Do I need it to send me a summary every morning of the news, emails, or anything else? What’s the usefulness? What benefit do I get? Do I need to have an agent I can ask anything by sending it a message? Maybe—but what would I ask it that I can’t already do myself, with the certainty that it’s 100% accurate? I often find myself at work seeing my boss (he’s around 70 years old) enthusiastic about every new thing; for him, everything is the revolution of everything. I see clients who, for every tiny problem, ask “can’t you fix it with AI?” as if it were the solution to everything, as if it had all the answers we need. But then you ask, “what would you actually use it for?” And they can’t give you an answer… I did some experiments at the company with our database (we develop a proprietary ERP, so we have tons of data that could be processed for analysis). I tried reading data like company revenue—well-formatted data, as simple as possible—and when I asked, “what is the total revenue for 2025 for customers from country X only?” it completely broke down. It misunderstands the questions, it messes up the sums. How can I create a tool that helps me if it’s faster for me to just write a specific query? I’ll say it again: I’m very passionate about technology, and AI certainly represents a revolution and will continue to be one more and more. But I really can’t understand what I’m supposed to do with something that writes poorly made code, creates useless workflows, answers me just to be “liked” by me, but does so with a mountain of bullshit. Am I the one using it wrong? It seems impossible to me that after all this time I still haven’t found a real point to it—and I hope it’s not only useful for asking for a cookie recipe, hoping it sends me the right ingredients… submitted by /u/Matteoberla

Originally posted by u/Matteoberla on r/ArtificialInteligence