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I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs

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Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs

#11

My experience is starkly different. Today I used LLMs to: 1. Write python code for a new type of loss function I was considering 2. Perform lots of annoying CSV munging ("split this CSV into 4 equal parts", "convert paths in this column into absolute paths", "combine these and then split into 4 distinct subsets based on this field.." - they're great for that) 3. Expedite some basic shell operations like "generate sof…

How did you integrate Claude into your shell

Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs

#12

My experience is starkly different. Today I used LLMs to: 1. Write python code for a new type of loss function I was considering 2. Perform lots of annoying CSV munging ("split this CSV into 4 equal parts", "convert paths in this column into absolute paths", "combine these and then split into 4 distinct subsets based on this field.." - they're great for that) 3. Expedite some basic shell operations like "generate sof…

How did you integrate Claude into your shell

Claude Code is available directly from Anthropic, but you have to request an invite as it's in "Research Preview"

There are third party tools that do the same, though

Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs

#13

My experience is starkly different. Today I used LLMs to: 1. Write python code for a new type of loss function I was considering 2. Perform lots of annoying CSV munging ("split this CSV into 4 equal parts", "convert paths in this column into absolute paths", "combine these and then split into 4 distinct subsets based on this field.." - they're great for that) 3. Expedite some basic shell operations like "generate sof…

These seem like fine use cases: trivial boilerplate stuff you’d otherwise have to search for and then munge to fit your exact need. An LLM can often do both steps for you. If it doesn’t work, you’ll know immediately and you can probably figure out whether it’s a quick fix or if the LLM is completely off-base.

Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs

#14

My experience (almost exclusively Claude), has just been so different that I don't know what to say. Some of the examples are the kinds of things I explicitly wouldn't expect LLMs to be particularly good at so I wouldn't use them for, and others, she says that it just doesn't work for her, and that experience is just so different than mine that I don't know how to respond. I think that there are two kinds of people w…

> Look for the ways that AI works, and it can be a powerful tool. Try and figure out where it still fails, and you will see nothing but hype and hot air. Not every use case is like this, but there are many.

The problem is that I feel I am constantly being bombarded by people bullish on AI saying "look how great this is" but when I try to do the exact same things they are doing, it doesn't work very well for me

Of course I am skeptical of positive claims as a result.

Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs

#15
post #8

My experience (almost exclusively Claude), has just been so different that I don't know what to say. Some of the examples are the kinds of things I explicitly wouldn't expect LLMs to be particularly good at so I wouldn't use them for, and others, she says that it just doesn't work for her, and that experience is just so different than mine that I don't know how to respond. I think that there are two kinds of people w…

The point is that given the current valuations, being good at a bunch of narrow use cases is just not good enough. It needs to be able to replace humans in every role where the primary output is text or speech to meet expectations.

I don't think that "replacing humans in every role" is the line for "being bullish on AI models". I think they could stop development exactly where they are, and they would still make pretty dramatic improvements to productivity in a lot of places. For me at least, their value already exceeds the $20/month I'm paying, and I'm pretty sure that way more than covers inference costs.

Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs

#16
I use them everyday and they work greatly, I even made a command (using Claude, actually Claude made everything in that script) that calls Gemini from the terminal so that I can ask for question related to the shell directly there, just doing a: ai "how can I convert a webp to a png", the system prompt asks to be brief, using markdown (it does display nicely), that most question are related to Linux and it provides information about my OS (uname -a), the last code block is also copied in the clipboard, super useful, I imagine there are plenty online of similar utilities.

Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs

#17

My experience is starkly different. Today I used LLMs to: 1. Write python code for a new type of loss function I was considering 2. Perform lots of annoying CSV munging ("split this CSV into 4 equal parts", "convert paths in this column into absolute paths", "combine these and then split into 4 distinct subsets based on this field.." - they're great for that) 3. Expedite some basic shell operations like "generate sof…

How did you integrate Claude into your shell

I hacked something together a while back - a hotkey toggles between standard terminal mode and LLM mode. LLM mode interacts with Claude, and has functions / tool calls to run shell commands, python code, web search, clipboard, and a few other things. For routine data science tasks it's been super useful. Claude 3.7 was a big step forward because it will often examine files before it begins manipulating them and double-checks that things were done correctly afterwards (without prompting!). For me this works a lot better than other shell-integration solutions like Warp

Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs

#18

My experience (almost exclusively Claude), has just been so different that I don't know what to say. Some of the examples are the kinds of things I explicitly wouldn't expect LLMs to be particularly good at so I wouldn't use them for, and others, she says that it just doesn't work for her, and that experience is just so different than mine that I don't know how to respond. I think that there are two kinds of people w…

> Look for the ways that AI works, and it can be a powerful tool. Try and figure out where it still fails, and you will see nothing but hype and hot air. Not every use case is like this, but there are many. The problem is that I feel I am constantly being bombarded by people bullish on AI saying "look how great this is" but when I try to do the exact same things they are doing, it doesn't work very well for me Of cou…

Exactly, thanks to all the money involved in such hype the incentives will always skew towards over spamming naive optimism about it's features.

Re: I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs

#19

My experience (almost exclusively Claude), has just been so different that I don't know what to say. Some of the examples are the kinds of things I explicitly wouldn't expect LLMs to be particularly good at so I wouldn't use them for, and others, she says that it just doesn't work for her, and that experience is just so different than mine that I don't know how to respond. I think that there are two kinds of people w…

> Look for the ways that AI works, and it can be a powerful tool. Try and figure out where it still fails, and you will see nothing but hype and hot air. Not every use case is like this, but there are many. The problem is that I feel I am constantly being bombarded by people bullish on AI saying "look how great this is" but when I try to do the exact same things they are doing, it doesn't work very well for me Of cou…

I don't know what you are doing or why it's failed. Maybe my primary use cases really are in the top whatever percentile for AI usefulness, but it doesn't feel like it. All I know is that frontier models have already been good enough for more than a year to increase my productivity by a fair bit.
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