Comment by hansmayer

2 days ago

Whether its blast furnaces or carbon fiber, the wear and tear (macroscopic changes) as well as material fatigue (molecular changes) is something that will be specified by the manufacturer, within some margin of error and you pretty much know what to expect - unless you are a smartass billionaire building an improvised sub off of carbon fiber whose expiry date was long due. However, the carbon fiber or your blast furnace wont break just on their own. So it's a weak analogy and a stretch at that. Now for your experiment: it has no value because a) you and me both know if you told your LLM that their output was shit, they would immediately "agree" with you and go off to produce some other crap b) For this to be a scientifically valid experiment at all, I'd expect on the order of 10.000 repetitions, each providing exactly the same output. But also on this you and me both know already the 2nd iteration will introduce some changes. So stop fighting the obvious and repeat after me: LLMs are shit for any serious work.

Why would I agree that "LLMs are shit for any serious work" when I've been using them for serious work for two+ years, as have many other people who's skills I respected from before LLMs came along?

I wrote about another solid case study this morning: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/14/justhtml/

I genuinely don't understand how you can look at all of this evidence and still conclude that they aren't useful for people who learn how to use them.

  • Well, you dont have to agree with that statement. But I havent seen a serious refute of my arguments either.