Those who say AI is not useful just don’t know how to use it. Simple as that. I wrote the below filtering and search improvement tool for our internal search engine’s web interface mostly using AI. Not even an agent — just plain ChatGPT.

None of what you see above save the search box existed prior to me and the AI constructing it. It’s all local CSS and JavaScript, by the way, but it provides advanced filtering and some additional search capabilities to an application that had zero of that before. It even uses local browser storage to remember the state of whether the filter bar is hidden or not (button not pictured). In other words, this isn’t some trivial application. Though they are not the most efficient, there are over 1,000 lines of code that allows the above to function, including some UI improvements not shown in this screenshot. (The “Quote” button toggles the result between quoted search and not, and the filters and chips filter the results returned. There are also dropdowns that do the same. The tool detects file extensions and file types dynamically and counts them.)

And sure, I could’ve written all this myself. With the LLM, I did it in 4-5 hours between its code, my own, and tweaking the outputs. If I’d attempted to it all myself sans LLM assistance I think it would’ve taken me minimum 80 hours and more likely 150-ish. That said, I am not a good programmer; a decent one could’ve probably done it in 20-30 hours from scratch.

In short, this is something extremely useful to me that I probably would not have attempted without LLM assistance. The time investment simply would’ve been too large. This will be true for wide swathes of the economy. Expand in your mind on the possibilities from there.