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To AI or not to AI

antropia.studio

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Re: To AI or not to AI

#11

Post by chrisweekly »

wintermutestwin wrote: post #9

I recently spent over an hour trying to get ChatGPT to give me some pretty simple rsync commands. It kept giving me command line parameters that didn't work on the version of rsync on my mac. With ~50% of the failures, it would go down troubleshooting rabbit holes and the rest of the time it would "realize" that it was giving incorrect version responses. I tell it to validate each parameter against my version moving…

Why involve an LLM at all, if you're looking up docs for a particular tool like rsync?

Re: To AI or not to AI

#12

Post by latexr »

wintermutestwin wrote: post #9

I recently spent over an hour trying to get ChatGPT to give me some pretty simple rsync commands. It kept giving me command line parameters that didn't work on the version of rsync on my mac. With ~50% of the failures, it would go down troubleshooting rabbit holes and the rest of the time it would "realize" that it was giving incorrect version responses. I tell it to validate each parameter against my version moving…

> I am not a coder (much), but I have to wonder if my experience is common in the coding world?

It is, yes. Surely someone will come and tell you it doesn’t happen to them, but all that tells you is that it ostensibly isn’t universal, but still common enough you’ll find no end of complaints.

> Maybe there are ways to avoid this (and others) pitfall with prompting?

Prompting can’t help you with things not in the training set. For many languages, all LLMs absolutely suck. Even for simple CLI tools, telling an LLM you are on macOS or using the BSD version may not be enough to get them to stop giving you the GNU flags. Furthermore, the rsync change in macOS is fairly recent so there’s even fewer data online on it.

https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2025/04/06/rsync-replaced-...

> As it is, I do not see at all how LLMs could really save time on programming tasks without also costing more time dealing with its quirks.

And that’s the best case scenario. It also happens that people blindly commit LLM code and introduce bugs and security flaw they cannot understand or fix.

https://secondthoughts.ai/p/ai-coding-slowdown

https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.03622

Re: To AI or not to AI

#13

Post by harvey9 »

chrisweekly wrote: post #11
wintermutestwin wrote: post #9

I recently spent over an hour trying to get ChatGPT to give me some pretty simple rsync commands. It kept giving me command line parameters that didn't work on the version of rsync on my mac. With ~50% of the failures, it would go down troubleshooting rabbit holes and the rest of the time it would "realize" that it was giving incorrect version responses. I tell it to validate each parameter against my version moving…

Why involve an LLM at all, if you're looking up docs for a particular tool like rsync?

Not the op, but I sometimes find the official documents hard to parse. Not looking at rsync in this case. On the other hand I have the same experience with LLMs as the op.

Big thanks to all the doc writers who include vignettes right in the documents.

Re: To AI or not to AI

#14

Post by serbuvlad »

jmkni wrote: post #4

I can relate to a lot of this. Where I find AI most useful is getting it to do tasks I already know how to do, but would take time. If you understand the problem you are trying to solve well enough to explain it to the LLM, you can get good results, you can also eyeball the outputted code and know right away if it's what you are after. Getting it to do things you don't know how to do is where it goes off the rails IM…

Exactly. AI is your intern, not your contractor.

Re: To AI or not to AI

#15

Post by Yoric »

wintermutestwin wrote: post #9

I recently spent over an hour trying to get ChatGPT to give me some pretty simple rsync commands. It kept giving me command line parameters that didn't work on the version of rsync on my mac. With ~50% of the failures, it would go down troubleshooting rabbit holes and the rest of the time it would "realize" that it was giving incorrect version responses. I tell it to validate each parameter against my version moving…

Pretty much my experience, yes.

Re: To AI or not to AI

#16

Post by goalieca »

wintermutestwin wrote: post #9

I recently spent over an hour trying to get ChatGPT to give me some pretty simple rsync commands. It kept giving me command line parameters that didn't work on the version of rsync on my mac. With ~50% of the failures, it would go down troubleshooting rabbit holes and the rest of the time it would "realize" that it was giving incorrect version responses. I tell it to validate each parameter against my version moving…

> I tell it to validate each parameter against my version moving forward and it clearly doesn't do that.

I would like an AI expert to weigh in on this point. I run into this a lot. It seems that LLMs, being language models and all, don't actually understand what i'm asking. Whenever i dive into the math, superficially, it kind of makes sense why they don't. But it also seems like transformers or some secret sauce is code up specially for tasks like counting letters in a word so that AI doesn't seem embarrassing. Am I missing something?

Re: To AI or not to AI

#17

Post by wintermutestwin »

chrisweekly wrote: post #11
wintermutestwin wrote: post #9

I recently spent over an hour trying to get ChatGPT to give me some pretty simple rsync commands. It kept giving me command line parameters that didn't work on the version of rsync on my mac. With ~50% of the failures, it would go down troubleshooting rabbit holes and the rest of the time it would "realize" that it was giving incorrect version responses. I tell it to validate each parameter against my version moving…

Why involve an LLM at all, if you're looking up docs for a particular tool like rsync?

Lots of reasons! First off: where else do I go to learn this stuff? Man pages are reference for people who work in CLI all the time and not for virgin learners as they are are necessarily packed with the complete lexicon but with barely a thought to explaining real world examples of common tasks. There are a million Linux websites with the same versioning issues and inadequate explanations. I guess I could buy an oreily book and learn the topic end to end even though I will only need to know the syntax of a couple commands.

With an LLM, I can get it to tell me what each parameter it suggests actually does and then I can ask it questions about that to further my understanding. That is a massive leg up over the knowledge spaghetti approach...

Re: To AI or not to AI

#18

Post by athrowaway3z »

wintermutestwin wrote: post #9

I recently spent over an hour trying to get ChatGPT to give me some pretty simple rsync commands. It kept giving me command line parameters that didn't work on the version of rsync on my mac. With ~50% of the failures, it would go down troubleshooting rabbit holes and the rest of the time it would "realize" that it was giving incorrect version responses. I tell it to validate each parameter against my version moving…

> Maybe there are ways to avoid this (and others) pitfall with prompting?

Not sure about Codex, but in Claude Code you can run commands. So instead of letting it freestyle / guess, do a:

`! man rsync` or `! rsync --help`

This puts the output into context.

Re: To AI or not to AI

#19

Post by Yoric »

serbuvlad wrote: post #14
jmkni wrote: post #4

I can relate to a lot of this. Where I find AI most useful is getting it to do tasks I already know how to do, but would take time. If you understand the problem you are trying to solve well enough to explain it to the LLM, you can get good results, you can also eyeball the outputted code and know right away if it's what you are after. Getting it to do things you don't know how to do is where it goes off the rails IM…

Exactly. AI is your intern, not your contractor.

More precisely, AI is your intern who won't improve during the internship, ever.

Re: To AI or not to AI

#20

Post by heckelson »

wintermutestwin wrote: post #17
chrisweekly wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why involve an LLM at all, if you're looking up docs for a particular tool like rsync?

Lots of reasons! First off: where else do I go to learn this stuff? Man pages are reference for people who work in CLI all the time and not for virgin learners as they are are necessarily packed with the complete lexicon but with barely a thought to explaining real world examples of common tasks. There are a million Linux websites with the same versioning issues and inadequate explanations. I guess I could buy an ore…

I like the tldr pages to learn the most common features and use cases of new command line tools! I think it's great, albeit, a bit slow sometimes
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