Comment by simonw
3 days ago
Yes, you have to learn those things. LLMs are hard to use.
So are animals, but we've used dogs and falcons and truffle hunting pigs as tools for thousands of years.
Non-deterministic tools are still tools, they just take a bunch more work to figure out.
It's like having Michael Jordan with dementia on your team. You start out mesmerized by how many points he can score, and then you get incredibly frustrated that he forgets he has to dribble and shoot into the correct hoop.
Spot on. Not to mention all the fouls and traveling the demented "all star" makes for your team, effectively negating any point gains.
> So are animals, but we've used dogs and falcons and truffle hunting pigs as tools for thousands of years.
Dogs learn their jobs way faster, more consistently and more expressively than any AI tool.
Trivially, dogs understand "good dog" and "bad dog" for example.
Reinforcement learning with AI tooling clearly seems not to work.
> Dogs learn their jobs way faster, more consistently and more expressively than any AI tool.
That doesn't match my experience with dogs or LLMs at all.
Ever heard of service dogs? Or police dogs? Now tell me, when will LLMs ever be safe to be used as assistance to blind people? Or will the big tech at some point release some sloppy blind-people-tool based on LLMs and unleash the LLM-influencers like yourself to start gaslighting the users into thinking they were "not holding it right" ? For mission and life critical problems, I'll take a dog any day, thank you very much!
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No, please, stop misleading people Simon. People use tools to make things easier for them, not harder. And a tool which I cannot steer predictably is not a god damn tool at all! The sheer persistence the AI-promoters like you are willing to invest just to gaslight us all into thinking we were dumb and did not know how to use the shit-generators is really baffling. Understand that a lot of us are early adopters and we see this shit for what it is - the most serious mess up of the "Big Tech" since Zuckerberg burned 77B for his metaverse idiocy. By the way - animals are not tools. People do not use them - they engage with them as helpers, companions and for some people, even friends of sorts. Drop your LLM and try engaging with someone who has a hunting dog for example - they'd be quite surprised if you referred to their beloved retriever as a "tool". And you might learn something about a real intelligence.
Your insistence that LLMs are not useful tools is difficult for me to empathize with as someone who has been using them successfully as useful tools for several years - and sharing in great detail how I am using them.
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/10/html-tools/ is the 37th post in my series about this: https://simonwillison.net/series/using-llms/
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/ is probably still my most useful of those.
I know you absolutely hate being told you're holding them wrong... but you're holding them wrong.
They're not nearly as unpredictable as you appear to think they are.
One of us is misleading people here, and I don't think it's me.
> One of us is misleading people here, and I don't think it's me.
Firstly, I am not the one with an LLM-influencer side-gig. Secondly - No sorry, please don't move the goalposts. You did not answer my main argument - which is - how does a "tool" which constantly change its behaviour deserve being called a tool at all? If a tailor had scissors which cut the fabric sometimes just a bit, and sometimes completely differently every time they used it, would you tell the tailor he is not using them right too? Thirdly you are now contradicting yourself. First you said we need to live with the fact that they are un-predictable. Now you are sugarcoating it into being "a bit unpredictable", or "not as nearly unpredictable". I am not sure if you are doing this intentionally or do you really want to believe in the "magic" but either way you are ignoring the ground tenets of how this technology works. I'd be fine if they used it to generate cheap holiday novels or erotica - but clearly after four years of experimenting with the crap machines to write code created a huge pushback in the community - we don't need the proverbial scissors which cut our fabric differently each time!
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> I know you absolutely hate being told you're holding them wrong... but you're holding them wrong.
Wow, was that a shark just then?