My trades friends don’t use AI, one of them doesn’t even know the names of any of the models.
My wife first heard about LLMs this year. She’s never used one, she’s never seen anyone use one, she doesn’t know anyone who has used one. She’s an engineer.
Lemmy leans way too heavily towards tech workers. There is a whole world of people that have literally nothing to do with our field and the trends inside it. They know nothing about it, they’ve no interest in engaging with it, it’s completely useless to them.
My wife’s company recently adopted using Active Directory for managing users.
EDIT: To take it a step further, I work adjacent to OEM manufacturers for industrial control systems. Half of our customers are running windows 98.
The handiman who works for my family quite often is not super technical. He was troubleshooting a mini split for me and I walked out to see him vocally chatting with chat gpt going through error codes, handless.
He found a use, and you’d be wrong to assume “trades” are safe from the chatbot. That doesn’t mean his job is going away, but maybe he can do more solo jobs and doesn’t need a helper all the time. Or maybe he does his jobs faster. Who knows!
People don’t need to know model names to find a use.
One in eight people globally use an AI app, not just something that happens to include an ai feature like Google search, on a regular basis.
There are definitely still going to be pockets totally not touching it, and that will probably continue for a long time, but its very much soaking into global society.
None of that means you should be using it, just pointing out that your immediate social group may not be an accurate reflection of reality.
Like as a counter anecdote - my gran has used it - and i feel like when old people get to a tech its approaching ubiquity, Facebook being the primary example I have in mind.
I’m told it’s useful for things that aren’t searching for things on the internet or performing groundbreaking theoretical mathematics research. I’m starting to think my interests are too boring for it to really touch anything other than coding, which as I’ve said elsewhere I have ceded and am now exiting the field I am in.
Its no different from any other tool really, you don’t pick it up and immediately master it, you learn what it is and isn’t good at and ideas come over time as you go about your life and you wonder if problems that might previously not have been worth even trying to solve could be worth throwing at this new tool.
I used it to get a overview of the most popular tracks in a specific genre in a specific city 20 years ago by pulling set list data from various places on the internet the other day. Incredible results.
Trivial but very useful to me, as someone who spends a lot of time looking for new music.
I would love it if the UX was just a bit better. I don’t like that the primary interaction is natural language personally. It would be cool if LLM interaction was through a DSL like a LISP. Would make the experience somewhat more appealing and, in my case at least, a bit more user friendly
To take it a step further, I work adjacent to OEM manufacturers for industrial control systems. Half of our customers are running windows 98.
Hah! I’d actually consider industrial automation to be one of the more-likely applications for LLMs. Not necessarily LLMs driving the system, but outputting software to drive PLCs and similar. My understanding from past reading is that industrial automation is one of the principal things that China is interested in using LLMs for.
Down on the shop floor, industrial AI agents are currently running most solidly in four types of scenarios.
Quality inspection. Vision large models are replacing traditional rule-based machine vision. Among the 12 lighthouse factories newly added by the World Economic Forum in September 2025, AI and generative AI use cases account for up to 50%, with demonstration factories reporting results including a 41% reduction in product defect rates.
Process parameter optimization. In the Baosteel hot-rolling line case disclosed by Huawei Cloud, the Huawei Pangu large model improved finishing-mill width-spread prediction accuracy by more than 5% and raised yield by 0.5%, which by its own account translates into more than 90 million yuan in additional annual revenue. It should be noted that such figures are all vendor-disclosed and still lack independent third-party verification, but directionally they are consistent with public data from lighthouse factories.
Engineering and maintenance assistance. Siemens Industrial Copilot improves the efficiency of generating programmable logic controller code by roughly 60%, and pilots of its maintenance edition show an average 25% saving in reactive maintenance time; the product won the Hermes Award at Hannover Messe 2025. The factory operations agent Microsoft launched at Hannover Messe 2025 lets employees ask in natural language, “Why did Line 3 stop yesterday?”
Scheduling and order management. This is the entry point closest to AI agents for small and mid-sized factories. An AI tool aimed at small and mid-sized factories has disclosed a set of figures: after adopting AI scheduling and order tracking, factories’ average order delay rate fell from 25% to within 5%; one factory in Dongguan cut its order-splitting preparation time by 60%; and an annual fee of about 10,000 yuan corresponded to a return of roughly 1:12. These are again vendor figures, but they touch on an important fact—the value of AI agents for small and mid-sized factories lies first not in sophisticated process optimization, but in freeing up the labor tied down by high-frequency, tedious work such as order tracking and scheduling.
They mention PLC code generation, but I guess some other areas too.
It’s not that you can’t use LLM’s in the industrial space. It’s that there’s not much, in my experience, demand to do so.
I have worked with a food packaging plant (one of those Window’s 98 places). They are still using RSLinx from like, decades ago. Why would they change it? The PLC code does not need to be updated except under specific circumstances (which is why we use ladder logic in the first place).
New stuff may use it, but a company creating a new industrial product doesn’t really translate into that product being purchased.
This is something I think software people tend to struggle with. In “traditional” engineering you can’t just deploy something to prod. Projects take years for approval, years of testing, years to go through the political process, years to build. The things you see getting built today were being designed 10 years ago using technology from 40 years ago.
Design is normally the first thing to happen before the rest of the above does and its the fastest part of the process already. Because of this big projects are allergic as fuck to new technology. I have watched proposals for a more advanced high-pressure CO2 turbine system get knocked down purely because “it’s not what we’re used to.” That “new fangled design” was roughly 30 years old at that point. Nuclear plant’s just started implementing general purpose microprocessors.
I really believe a lot of Lemmy would benefit from spending a turn working on, like, nuclear commissioning or substation work. Software tends to compress peoples idea of a what a reasonable timeline for going from idea -> proposal -> design -> implementation is.
I’m not saying that eventually AI won’t be used but we have a understand that most of the time the customers have no interest in adding anything.
How would she know if she’s only just found out herself?
These things are heavily used in engineering
In addition, the tradesmen who have done work on our place lately have all been using AI. One took photos during quotation and used AI to show what it’ll look like when they are done. One used it for invoicing. One used it to find the right parts. I’d argue your bubble in the world is an exception rather than the rule
Why is that funny? It did a great job. A big problem in the industry is tradesmen forget to invoice for jobs, and when they do invoice their invoices are not well itemised and the works are not well described. After all, they are tradies not accountants.
All the pieces of work had great descriptions of the work performed, it was well itemised and was provided same-day - not weeks later
Yeah, all my buddies use AI heavily on the job. You can very quickly create draft plans and models. I just looked through the schematics for a wind farm, all the underground work that’s needed, foundations, etc. All generated with AI
You upload a photo to the agent of your choice, e.g. openai, grok, Gemini
It modifies the image according to your instructions. E.g. “show this wall patched, with a black tile splashback using red grout, and the rest of the wall painted a glossy maroon”
The tradesmen and the customer can agree on what the work is supposed to be before it’s done, preventing misunderstandings.
But like… Why? I’ve had work done on homes before and did not request a image… What is the purpose of the image? Do the tradesmen use the image to perform their work? If so why not model it in CAD? If not, why use it at all?
The tradesmen say, “is this what you want” and you say “yep”. Everyone is on the same page
Takes about thirty seconds
Why model in CAD? Who is paying for that? Are your carpenters and plasterers able to make anything in CAD? Such an effort could blow the cost of the job out 10x
If you wanted it modelled in CAD, you’d do the initial pass and most of the work with AI too
So the image is not used. It’s done for fun? I suppose that’s fine if they’re just showing it to you for vibes but I don’t see how that would be different from me asking a tiler to do my shower tile-work, telling them what I would like, and them showing me a meme on reddit. Cool I guess? Please return to the tiling task?
Honestly I would prefer they just send over a sample. Why get a pretend image of what it will look like when I could just see a tile for free?
And why would I use AI for the CAD work? I know how to use CAD. I suppose if I was in a situation where someone had a gun to my head and said that I had to render a sink fixture in under 45 seconds I might be motivated to speed up that process but I can’t think of a time in my life where I faced bodily harm if I did not complete a creative task quickly.
EDIT: Nevermind, I can think of a few times I have faced bodily harm based on the speed I could complete arbitrary creative tasks.
Dog I’m dying for someone to give me a use case. Really I am.
I work in a field that kind of straddles the line between tech and industrial systems. On the tech side of the house people eat this shit up because it can code. On the industrial side its crickets.
I’ll be honest, I think there’s a point of diminishing returns on convenience. Agent swarms can do what for me? Book an airline? Answer an email? The jump from sending letters to writing emails was massive. The jump from sending emails to asking a robot to send an email is miniscule. I have very few problems that can be solved with a computer and, honestly, I think that may be the case for a lot of people.
Unless these things can put out assassinations there utility to me is limited to “searches for things good”.
My trades friends don’t use AI, one of them doesn’t even know the names of any of the models.
My wife first heard about LLMs this year. She’s never used one, she’s never seen anyone use one, she doesn’t know anyone who has used one. She’s an engineer.
Lemmy leans way too heavily towards tech workers. There is a whole world of people that have literally nothing to do with our field and the trends inside it. They know nothing about it, they’ve no interest in engaging with it, it’s completely useless to them.
My wife’s company recently adopted using Active Directory for managing users.
EDIT: To take it a step further, I work adjacent to OEM manufacturers for industrial control systems. Half of our customers are running windows 98.
The handiman who works for my family quite often is not super technical. He was troubleshooting a mini split for me and I walked out to see him vocally chatting with chat gpt going through error codes, handless.
He found a use, and you’d be wrong to assume “trades” are safe from the chatbot. That doesn’t mean his job is going away, but maybe he can do more solo jobs and doesn’t need a helper all the time. Or maybe he does his jobs faster. Who knows!
People don’t need to know model names to find a use.
One in eight people globally use an AI app, not just something that happens to include an ai feature like Google search, on a regular basis.
There are definitely still going to be pockets totally not touching it, and that will probably continue for a long time, but its very much soaking into global society.
https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2026-global-overview-report
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Use_of_artificial_intelligence_by_individuals
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/topics/ai-economy-institute/reports/global-ai-diffusion-report/
None of that means you should be using it, just pointing out that your immediate social group may not be an accurate reflection of reality.
Like as a counter anecdote - my gran has used it - and i feel like when old people get to a tech its approaching ubiquity, Facebook being the primary example I have in mind.
Probably, which is depressing.
I’m told it’s useful for things that aren’t searching for things on the internet or performing groundbreaking theoretical mathematics research. I’m starting to think my interests are too boring for it to really touch anything other than coding, which as I’ve said elsewhere I have ceded and am now exiting the field I am in.
Its no different from any other tool really, you don’t pick it up and immediately master it, you learn what it is and isn’t good at and ideas come over time as you go about your life and you wonder if problems that might previously not have been worth even trying to solve could be worth throwing at this new tool.
I used it to get a overview of the most popular tracks in a specific genre in a specific city 20 years ago by pulling set list data from various places on the internet the other day. Incredible results.
Trivial but very useful to me, as someone who spends a lot of time looking for new music.
I would love it if the UX was just a bit better. I don’t like that the primary interaction is natural language personally. It would be cool if LLM interaction was through a DSL like a LISP. Would make the experience somewhat more appealing and, in my case at least, a bit more user friendly
Hah! I’d actually consider industrial automation to be one of the more-likely applications for LLMs. Not necessarily LLMs driving the system, but outputting software to drive PLCs and similar. My understanding from past reading is that industrial automation is one of the principal things that China is interested in using LLMs for.
searches
https://faxiangongchang.com/en/reports/china-industrial-ai-agent-2026
They mention PLC code generation, but I guess some other areas too.
It’s not that you can’t use LLM’s in the industrial space. It’s that there’s not much, in my experience, demand to do so.
I have worked with a food packaging plant (one of those Window’s 98 places). They are still using RSLinx from like, decades ago. Why would they change it? The PLC code does not need to be updated except under specific circumstances (which is why we use ladder logic in the first place).
New stuff may use it, but a company creating a new industrial product doesn’t really translate into that product being purchased.
This is something I think software people tend to struggle with. In “traditional” engineering you can’t just deploy something to prod. Projects take years for approval, years of testing, years to go through the political process, years to build. The things you see getting built today were being designed 10 years ago using technology from 40 years ago.
Design is normally the first thing to happen before the rest of the above does and its the fastest part of the process already. Because of this big projects are allergic as fuck to new technology. I have watched proposals for a more advanced high-pressure CO2 turbine system get knocked down purely because “it’s not what we’re used to.” That “new fangled design” was roughly 30 years old at that point. Nuclear plant’s just started implementing general purpose microprocessors.
I really believe a lot of Lemmy would benefit from spending a turn working on, like, nuclear commissioning or substation work. Software tends to compress peoples idea of a what a reasonable timeline for going from idea -> proposal -> design -> implementation is.
I’m not saying that eventually AI won’t be used but we have a understand that most of the time the customers have no interest in adding anything.
What
How would she know if she’s only just found out herself?
These things are heavily used in engineering
In addition, the tradesmen who have done work on our place lately have all been using AI. One took photos during quotation and used AI to show what it’ll look like when they are done. One used it for invoicing. One used it to find the right parts. I’d argue your bubble in the world is an exception rather than the rule
AHAHAHAHAHA
Why is that funny? It did a great job. A big problem in the industry is tradesmen forget to invoice for jobs, and when they do invoice their invoices are not well itemised and the works are not well described. After all, they are tradies not accountants.
All the pieces of work had great descriptions of the work performed, it was well itemised and was provided same-day - not weeks later
An actual engineer, not a software engineer.
Yeah, all my buddies use AI heavily on the job. You can very quickly create draft plans and models. I just looked through the schematics for a wind farm, all the underground work that’s needed, foundations, etc. All generated with AI
Damn… I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near a giant wind turbine on a stormy day if the engineers had vibe-planned the foundations…
Sorry brother-man. Her field doesn’t touch them.
… Why? How would an LLM “show you what it will look like?”
Are they using the LLM as a basis for what they’re going to do? Why would they do that?
You upload a photo to the agent of your choice, e.g. openai, grok, Gemini
It modifies the image according to your instructions. E.g. “show this wall patched, with a black tile splashback using red grout, and the rest of the wall painted a glossy maroon”
The tradesmen and the customer can agree on what the work is supposed to be before it’s done, preventing misunderstandings.
But like… Why? I’ve had work done on homes before and did not request a image… What is the purpose of the image? Do the tradesmen use the image to perform their work? If so why not model it in CAD? If not, why use it at all?
The tradesmen say, “is this what you want” and you say “yep”. Everyone is on the same page
Takes about thirty seconds
Why model in CAD? Who is paying for that? Are your carpenters and plasterers able to make anything in CAD? Such an effort could blow the cost of the job out 10x
If you wanted it modelled in CAD, you’d do the initial pass and most of the work with AI too
So the image is not used. It’s done for fun? I suppose that’s fine if they’re just showing it to you for vibes but I don’t see how that would be different from me asking a tiler to do my shower tile-work, telling them what I would like, and them showing me a meme on reddit. Cool I guess? Please return to the tiling task?
Honestly I would prefer they just send over a sample. Why get a pretend image of what it will look like when I could just see a tile for free?
And why would I use AI for the CAD work? I know how to use CAD. I suppose if I was in a situation where someone had a gun to my head and said that I had to render a sink fixture in under 45 seconds I might be motivated to speed up that process but I can’t think of a time in my life where I faced bodily harm if I did not complete a creative task quickly.
EDIT: Nevermind, I can think of a few times I have faced bodily harm based on the speed I could complete arbitrary creative tasks.
Alright you’re being intentionally ignorant, you can just say you don’t want to use it yourself that’s fine
Dog I’m dying for someone to give me a use case. Really I am.
I work in a field that kind of straddles the line between tech and industrial systems. On the tech side of the house people eat this shit up because it can code. On the industrial side its crickets.
I’ll be honest, I think there’s a point of diminishing returns on convenience. Agent swarms can do what for me? Book an airline? Answer an email? The jump from sending letters to writing emails was massive. The jump from sending emails to asking a robot to send an email is miniscule. I have very few problems that can be solved with a computer and, honestly, I think that may be the case for a lot of people.
Unless these things can put out assassinations there utility to me is limited to “searches for things good”.