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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

#61

Post by jwrallie »

The author mentioned Gemini sometimes refusing to do something.

I’ve recently been using Gemini (mostly 2.0 flash) a lot and I’ve noticed it sometimes will challenge me to try doing something by myself. Maybe it’s something in my system prompt or the way I worded the request itself. I am a long time user of 4o so it felt annoying at first.

Since my purpose was to learn how to do something, being open minded I tried to comply with the request and I can say that… it’s being a really great experience in terms of retention of knowledge. Even if I’m making mistakes Gemini will point them out and explain it nicely.

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

#62

Post by SoftTalker »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #22
MostlyStable wrote: post #4

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…

every time someone brings up "Code that doesn't need to deal with edge cases" I like to point at that such code is not likely to be used for anything that matters

I write code like that all the time. It's used for very specific use cases, only by myself or something I've also written. It's not exposed to random end users or inputs.

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

#63

Post by dale_glass »

turtletontine wrote: post #30
bluefirebrand wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 literally had a developer of an open source package I’m working with tell me “yeah that’s a known problem, I gave up on trying to fix it. You should just ask ChatGPT to fix it, I bet it will immediately know the answer.” Annoying response of course. But I’d never used an LLM to debug before, so I figured I’d give it a try. First: it regurgitated a bunch of documentation and basic debugging tips, which might have ac…

On the other hand, when it works it's darn near magic.

I spent like a week trying to figure out why a livecd image I was working on wasn't initializing devices correctly. Read the docs, read source code, tried strace, looked at the logs, found forums of people with the same problem but no solution, you know the drill. In desperation I asked ChatGPT. ChatGPT said "Use udevadm trigger". I did. Things started working.

For some problems it's just very hard to express them in a googleable form, especially if you're doing something weird almost nobody else does.

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

#64

Post by simonw »

cool_dude85 wrote: post #47
runjake wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More often than not, when I inquire deeper, I often find their prompting isn't very good at all. "Garbage in, garbage out" as the law says. Of course, it took a lot of trial and error for me to get to my current level of effectiveness with LLMs. It's probably our responsibility to teach these who are willing.

It seems hard to be bullish on LLMs as a generally useful tool if the solution to problems people have is "use trial and error to improve how you write your prompts, no, it's not obvious how to do so, yes, it depends heavily on the exact model you use."

You could say that about any power tool.

A Mitre Saw is an amazing thing to have in a woodshop, but if you don't learn how to use it you're probably going to cut off a finger.

The problem is that LLMs are power tools that are sold as being so easy to use that you don't need to invest any effort in learning them at all. That's extremely misleading.

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

#66

Post by BSOhealth »

Like others here, I use it to code (no longer a professional engineer, but keep side projects).

As soon as LLMs were introduced into the IDE it began to feeling like LLM autocomplete was almost reading my mind. With some context built up over a few hundred lines of initial architecture, autocomplete now sees around the same corners I am. It’s more than just “solve this contrived puzzle” or “write snake”. It combines the subject matter use case (informed by variable and type naming) underlying the architecture and sometimes produces really breathtaking and productive results. Like I said, it took some time but when it happened, it was pretty shocking.

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

#67

Post by krapp »

puppycodes wrote: post #53

Here's one simple reason: I have a very specific esoteric question like: "What material is both electrically conductive and good at blocking sound?" I could type this into google and sift through the titles and short descriptions of websites and eventually maybe find an answer, or I can put the question to the LLM and instantly get an answer that I can then research further to confirm. This is significantly faster, m…

I mean, the first link I got when I pasted that in is probably the Stack Exchange thread you would use to research further, along with other sources, which do seem relevant to the query.

I don't see how an LLM is significantly faster or more informative, since you still have to do the legwork to validate the answer. I guess if you're google-phobic (which a lot of people seem to be, especially on HN) then I can see how it's more rewarding to put it off until later in the process.

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

#68

Post by SoftTalker »

sdenton4 wrote: post #49
turtletontine wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I literally had a developer of an open source package I’m working with tell me “yeah that’s a known problem, I gave up on trying to fix it. You should just ask ChatGPT to fix it, I bet it will immediately know the answer.” Annoying response of course. But I’d never used an LLM to debug before, so I figured I’d give it a try. First: it regurgitated a bunch of documentation and basic debugging tips, which might have ac…

This morning I was using an LLM to develop some SQL queries against a database it had never seen before. I gave it a starting point, and outlined what I wanted to do. It proposed a solution, which was a bit wrong, mostly because I hadn't given it the full schema to work with. Small nudges and corrections, and we had something that worked. From there, I iterated and added more features to the outputs. At many points,…

I wonder if it breaks like this: people who don't know how to code find LLMs very helpful and don't realize where they are wrong. People who do know immediately see all the things they get wrong and they just give up and say "I'll do it myself".

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

#69

Post by heraldgeezer »

MostlyStable wrote: post #4

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…

>A lot of what I do is relatively simple one off scripting. Code that doesn't need to deal with edge cases, won't be widely deployed, and whose outputs are very quickly and easily verifiable.

Yes somewhat. Its good for powershell/bash/cmd scripts and configs, but early models it would hallucinate PowerShell cmdlets especially.

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

#70

Post by simonw »

mnky9800n wrote: post #11
latemedium wrote: post #5

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 wrote my own tool for that a while back as an LLM plugin, so I can do this:

    llm cmd extract first frame of movie.mp4 as a jpeg using ffmpeg
I use that all the time, it works really well (defaulting to GPT-4o-mini because it's so cheap, but it works with Claude too): https://simonwillison.net/2024/Mar/26/llm-cmd/
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