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oneusefulthing.org
Personal blog · oneusefulthing.orgaicareerwriting
oneusefulthing.org is a personal blog at oneusefulthing.org about ai, career and writing. Since 2023, 108 different Hacker News readers have linked it 164 times, most often “Field experimental evidence of AI on knowledge worker productivity and quality”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Sometimes recommended · 9 of 32 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Ethan Mollick's One Useful Thing for accessible writing on using and judging generative AI, such as the AI-as-intern framing and summaries of research studies. Commenters often pass posts along to colleagues or students.
- Recommended for · 9 comments
- Called a great way to think of AI, a consistently great writer with demos, and very useful for getting up to speed.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 32 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Field experimental evidence of AI on knowledge worker productivity and quality10 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2023-09-16
- Let's Talk about ChatGPT with Code Interpreter and Microsoft Copilot6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2023-05-02
- Real AI Agents and Real Work4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-09-29
- The recent history of AI in 32 otters4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-06-02
- Prophecies of the Flood4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-01-10
- The Shape of AI: Jaggedness, Bottlenecks and Salients3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-12-20
- The End of Search, the Beginning of Research3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-02-03
- A new generation of AIs: Claude 3.7 and Grok 33 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-02-25
- A Guide to Which AI to Use in the Agentic Era3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-02-18
- How to Use AI to Do Stuff: An Opinionated Guide3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-07-15
What Hacker News says?
In the interests of gathering these pre-release impressions, here's Ethan Mollick's writeup: https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/gpt-5-it-just-does-stuff Thank you to Simon; your notes are exactly what I was hoping for.
Comment linking /p/gpt-5-it-just-does-stuff
on “GPT-5”Submitted No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation as a story · 445 points
HN discussionI wish the author had state out right that they were not using LLMs much, since their opinion on them and their output has no value (its a new technology, and different enough that you do have to spend some time with them in order to be able to find out what value they have for your particluar work[0]. The is especially the case when you are about to complain about style, since that can easily be adjusted, by simply…
Comment linking /p/centaurs-and-cyborgs-on-the-jagged
on “I'd rather read the prompt”Submitted Three Years from GPT-3 to Gemini 3 as a story · 352 points
HN discussionSee also: The recent history of AI in 32 otters https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-recent-history-of-ai-in...
Comment linking /p/the-recent-history-of-ai-in-32-otters
on “The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on bicycles”Submitted Jagged AGI: o3, Gemini 2.5, and everything after as a story · 265 points
HN discussion> It's very good at some kinds of reasoning and very bad at others. There's not much it's mediocre at. Yes, one of the terms for this phenomenon is "jagged frontier" from here: https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/centaurs-and-cyborgs-on-the... This is also the main reason people have such diverging experiences and the discussion around AI is so bimodal in nature.
Comment linking /p/centaurs-and-cyborgs-on-the-jagged
on “Claude Code is all you need”Submitted Field experimental evidence of AI on knowledge worker productivity and quality as a story · 139 points
HN discussion• Bard when launched was using one of the PaLM models, which is inferior to GPT-3.5 (the free version of ChatGPT). • Bard since a couple of months ago was using Gemini Pro, which is roughly comparable (a bit worse or better depending on whom you ask) to GPT-3.5. • Bard is now (today) called Gemini, available as "Gemini" and "Gemini Advanced". The former is still comparable to the free version of ChatGPT, and the lat…
Comment linking /p/google-gemini-advanced-tasting-notes
on “Bard is now Gemini, and we’re rolling out a mobile app and Gemini Advanced”Submitted GPT-5: It just does stuff as a story · 65 points
HN discussionYes, a great way to think of it is as a widely read intern: https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/on-boarding-your-ai-intern You’ve still got to avoid prompting for questionable code in the first place, eg, splitting SQL statements on semicolons with an ad-hoc regex is going to fail in edge cases, but may be sufficient for a specific task.
Comment linking /p/on-boarding-your-ai-intern
on “Phind-70B: Closing the code quality gap with GPT-4 Turbo while running 4x faster”Submitted Reflections on using OpenAI o1 / Strawberry for 1 month as a story · 46 points
HN discussionLLMs can definitely produce original other stuff: ask it to create an original poem and on an extremely specific niche subject and it will do so. You can specify the niche subject to the point where it is incredibly unlikely that there is a poem on that subject in its training data, and it will still produce an original poem on that subject [0]. The well-known "otter using wifi on a plane" series of images [1] is an…
Comment linking /p/the-recent-history-of-ai-in-32-otters
on “I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude”Submitted The Cybernetic Teammate as a story · 44 points
HN discussionrelated: Post-apocalyptic education What comes after the Homework Apocalypse by Ethan Mollick https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/post-apocalyptic-education
Comment linking /p/post-apocalyptic-education
on “Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations”Submitted Management as AI superpower: Thriving in a world of agentic AI as a story · 38 points
HN discussionThis is the "Wait Calculation" and it's fiendish because there exists only some small, finite window in which it is indeed better to start before the tech is "better" in order to "win" (i.e. get "there" first, wherever "there" is in your scenario). Here's a nice article about it: https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-lazy-tyranny-of-the-wai...
Comment linking /p/the-lazy-tyranny-of-the-wait-calculation
on “Agent design is still hard”Submitted What it feels like to work with Mythos as a story · 19 points
HN discussionI signed up for Gemini Advanced to get access to Deep Research on Feb 1st and felt on top of the world. So cool, so advanced. Then OpenAI announced theirs on the 2nd: https://openai.com/index/introducing-deep-research/ Ethan Mollick called Google's undergraduate level and OpenAI's graduate level on the 3rd: https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-end-of-search-the-begin... And now this. I can't stop thinking about The…
Comment linking /p/the-end-of-search-the-beginning-of
on “Open Deep Research”Submitted The dot and the Swarm: Benefitting from the bitter lesson as a story · 14 points
HN discussionNot mentioned yet, Ethan Mollick's One Useful Thing: https://www.oneusefulthing.org/ It helped me get up to speed with gen AI as a graduate school professor and now his posts are the most useful ones I sent to others to help them get oriented.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite blog in 2024?”Submitted 15 Times to use AI, and 5 Not to as a story · 12 points
HN discussionA while back, someone here linked to this story[0]. It's a bit simplified and idealized, but is actually fairly spot-on. I have been using AI every day. Just today, I used ChatGPT to translate an app string into 5 languages. [0] https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/superhuman-what-can-ai-do-i...
Comment linking /p/superhuman-what-can-ai-do-in-30-minutes
on “AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era”Submitted I, Cyborg: Using Co-Intelligence as a story · 10 points
HN discussionI think this may be close to what Ethan Mollick has discussed regarding the AI's having a specific "taste". This is how they draw pelicans but obviously if you asked them to make different versions that are more creative, they could do that. For now, this is one way humans can provide a lot of input and direction. https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-overhang
Comment linking /p/the-overhang
on “Why do LLM pelicans look like this?”Submitted Speaking Things into Existence as a story · 8 points
HN discussionYou should not think that LLMs are a good fit for anything. You should check if they are, and then try to guide it to be better at the task. You should do this because AI is a jagged frontier where humans can't predict if AI is good at something or not. >AI is weird. No one actually knows the full range of capabilities of the most advanced Large Language Models, like GPT-4. No one really knows the best ways to use t…
Comment linking /p/centaurs-and-cyborgs-on-the-jagged
on “Looming Liability Machines (LLMs)”Submitted GPT-5: It Just Does Stuff as a story · 7 points
HN discussionIf you don't want to read the full thing, Mollick's substack has more accessible summary of this paper: https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/centaurs-and-cyborgs-on-the... There are two sides to this thing. The first author of this paper has also written another paper titles "Falling Asleep at the Wheel: Human/AI Collaboration in a Field Experiment". Abstract: "As AI quality increases, humans have fewer incentives to ex…
Comment linking /p/centaurs-and-cyborgs-on-the-jagged
on “Field experimental evidence of AI on knowledge worker productivity and quality”Submitted Prophecies of the Flood as a story · 7 points
HN discussion
