Take LLMs: if humans can do something, or least are attempting to do something, chances are people tried doing it with an LLM, and at least some of those would claim that it does the job just as well as a human (insert many asterisks and caveats in small print if they have at least some integrity). I will not go into debating whether LLMs can replace programmers (or other jobs), or when that’s going to happen; many smarter people than myself have done so. I personally use Cursor (one of the fancy AI-first IDEs) at work and have found it to be excellent for certain types of tasks, especially of the exploratory or quick’n’dirty kind – and much less excellent for other types. But I can’t shake the impression that we might be holding it wrong.

One of the common and honestly valid complaints that AI skeptics have is that we’re replacing and automating the fun parts of people’s jobs, and that has been the focus of the discourse for usage of AI in programming too: the shift from writing code to reviewing AI-generated code is happening quite fast in some industries. Only time will tell what the consequences of this shift are, because no shift of such magnitude happens without unforeseen side effects. But where I find LLMs to be really underappreciated is small-scale automation of everyday tasks, even outside of typically programming contexts.

Here’s what I mean: Just a few days ago, I was putting together a few slides for a presentation - one of the really big shared decks for a full-day workshop and with multiple presenters. The file was 499MB. Half. A. Gig. I did not want to make things unnecessarily worse, so I pledged to downsize any stock photography I insert. And this is where the LLMs come in: I knew I could fire up GIMP or some other image editing software, edit the image in a few clicks, save it and be done with it. But this approach does not scale well and I knew I wanted a slightly more sophisticated solution.

Now this very simple problem has a million different solutions, from finding a dedicated software to do this in bulk all the way to writing a Python or Powershell script myself. The problem is I did not have time to fiddle around with this, and even if I did, the ROI was unclear: resizing 5-10 images manually can definitely be done faster than writing such a script, even if you’ve done something similar before. In a weird twist, the simplest problems become the most unlikely to automate since they solve just small annoyances, and coming up with a proper solution is not worth the time - or so it seems.

Enter LLMs. For all their issues with understanding larger codebases, using deprecated functions or methods, writing subpar code or just simply not being able to help you with more complex or rarer issues, they excel at small, contained and common problems. Write a Powershell script that takes the latest .jpg or .png image in my Downloads folder, resizes its larger side to 1920 pixels and saves it with a _resized suffix is all I needed to feed to an LLM to solve the issue, and you can bet that it was faster than resizing 5 of the images manually. It also basically does not matter which LLM you feed this into, they can all deal with this type of scripting without a hiccup. (You should always check the code, though: even though an rm -rf / situation is unlikely, you still don’t want any surprises.)

This unlocked something in my brain. I started looking for small, repetitive tasks that previously had no ROI, but become very viable with one-shotting the solution with an LLM. Your mileage may vary, but I am finding them everywhere I look. I realized I was holding it wrong. I should have utilized the LLM to automate the stupid, boring, manual stuff, because the bar for whether it’s worth my time automating it is so, so low nowadays. And the best thing about it? I don’t have to consider whether it has any impact on my programming foundations, because this is code that I would have never written. If anything, reading it taught me at least a little bit where otherwise I’d have done something manually in a piece of software.

I guarantee you that if you work on a computer, then you’re doing something repeatedly, and there are good chances you could automate at least parts of it with little effort using an LLM. Don’t hold it wrong!