Last month I rebuilt my pool's plumbing system with the help of YouTube and GPT. I was quoted $6k and it ended up costing me about $1k of materials and a few days of work. This was my first exposure to any kind of outdoor plumbing, I'd never touched PVC before.

It's unlikely I would have had the confidence to do it from YouTube alone, specific diagnostic help and a full diagram to work off of was extremely helpful. I had it prepare an SVG of the whole assembly with all the measurements and parts labeled.

Answers to a lot of questions, with breadth, depth and nuance. And assistance in carrying out work on a lot of fields, not just programming.

I installed Ubuntu on an old laptop that I let Claude Code sysadmin. It makes it really easy to self-host open source stuff, and if there are issues it can fix them too.

Funnily enough, I've had a somewhat mixed-to-hostile response when trying to upstream the vibecoded fixes, so I suspect using an LLM to fix broken open-source software (that human maintainers don't have the time to fix themselves, nor the humility to accept an LLM-authored fix) will become more of a thing going forward too.

Oh, it's also been identifying a bunch of patterns in sales data for my business that has been increasing monthly profit consistently since last November (around $4,000 USD, every month, cumulatively so far with no sign of slowing down - could easily be $10k/mo in increased gains by end of financial year).

It's really good at writing code.

Here are a couple examples: https://takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/build-gemini-build