Comment by 20k
11 hours ago
If I have to treat LLMs as a fallible source of information, why wouldn't I just go right to the source though? Having an extra step in between me and the actual truth seems pointless
WinAPI docs are pretty accurate and up to date
Because it's faster.
If the WinAPI docs are solid you can do things like copy and paste pages of them into Claude and ask a question, rather then manually scan through them looking for the answer yourself.
Apple's developer documentation is mostly awful - try finding out how to use the sips or sandbox-exec CLI tools for example. LLMs have unlocked those for me.
But you have to check the answer against the documentation anyway though, to validate that its actually correct!
Unless you're just taking the LLM answers at face value?
For most code stuff you don't check the answer against the documentation - you write the code and run it and see if it works.
That's always a better signal than anything that official documentation might tell you.
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Because it will take you years to read all the information you can get funneled through an LLM in a day
Except you have no idea if what the LLM is telling you is true
I do a lot of astrophysics. Universally LLMs are wrong about nearly every astrophysics questions I've asked them - even the basic ones, in every model I've ever tested. Its terrifying that people take these at face value
For research at a PhD level, they have absolutely no idea what's going on. They just make up plausible sounding rubbish
Astrophysicist David Kipping had a podcast episode a month ago reporting that LLMs are working shockingly well for him, as well as for the faculty at the IAS.[1]
It's curious how different people come to very different conclusions about the usefulness of LLMs.
https://youtu.be/PctlBxRh0p4
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Somehow we went from writing software apps and reading API docs to research level astrophysics
Sure it's not there yet. Give it a few months
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