Comment by taotau
7 months ago
The process you describe took me right back to my childhood days when I was fortunate to have a simple 8 bit computer running BASIC and a dialup modem. I discovered the concept of war dialing and pretty quickly found all the other modems in my local area code. I would connect to these systems and try some basic tools I knew of from having consumed the 100 or so RFCs that existed at the time (without any real software engineering knowledge - i was a 10 year old kid). I would poke and prod around each system, learning new things along the way, but essentially going in blind each time.
The only real advantage I had over the current crop of LLMs was the ability to reliably retain context between sessions, but even that wasnt very useful initially as every system was so bespoke.
I then moved on to using some level of social engineering to extend my ability to gain access to and learn about these systems.
Doing this over and over, I like to think I have developed some pretty complex understanding and abilities.
To me, the killer disadvantage for LLMs seems to be the complete and total lack of feedback. You would poke and prod, and the system would respond (which, btw, sounds like a super fun experience to explore the infant net!) An LLM doesn't have that. The LLM hears only silence and doesn't know about success, failure, error, discovery.