Comment by hansmayer
2 days ago
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!
> how does a "tool" which constantly change its behaviour deserve being called a tool at all?
Let's go with blast furnaces. They're definitely tools. They change over time - a team might constantly run one for twenty years but still need to monitor and adjust how they use it as the furnace itself changes behavior due to wear and tear (I think they call this "drift".)
The same is true of plenty of other tools - pottery kilns, cast iron pans, knife sharpening stones. Expert tool users frequently use tools that change over time and need to be monitored and adjusted.
I do think dogs and horses other animal tools remain an excellent example here as well. They're unpredictable and you have to constantly adapt to their latest behaviors.
I agree that LLMs are unpredictable in that they are non-deterministic by nature. I also think that this is something you can learn to account for as you build experience.
I just fed this prompt to Claude Code:
It did exactly what I expected it would do, based on my hundred of previous similar interventions with that tool: https://github.com/simonw/tools/pull/162
9 replies →
> 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?