Tell me about a time you used LLMs to improve your efficiency at work

On a small backend task, I had to add several unit tests around input validation, and I noticed I was spending a lot of time thinking through repetitive edge cases. I used an LLM to generate a list of likely boundary conditions and a rough test structure, then I checked each one against the actual code and our existing test patterns. A few suggestions were wrong for our implementation, so I removed those and rewrote the assertions myself. That cut the test-writing part from a few hours to about one hour, and because I had extra time, I also added one case around empty input that I might have missed otherwise. The main thing I learned was that it was much more useful for brainstorming and drafting than for final code I could trust directly.

At my last job, I spent a lot of time turning meeting notes and customer emails into clean status updates for my manager and the sales team. I started using an LLM to summarize long threads, pull out action items, and draft a first pass of the update in our usual format. I still read everything carefully and edited the tone and details myself, but it saved me from rewriting the same information over and over. It probably cut that work in half, and it also made my updates more consistent because I used the same structure every time. What I liked most was that it freed me up to spend more time following up on the actual customer issues instead of just documenting them.