Comment by alwillis
7 hours ago
I get that AI isn’t deterministic by definition, but IMHO it’s become the go-to response for a reason to not use AI, regardless of the use case.
I’ve never seen AI “hallucinate” on basic data transformation tasks. If you tell it to convert JSON to YAML, that’s what you’re going to get. Most LLMs are probably using something like jq to do the conversion in the background anyway.
AI experts say AI models don’t hallucinate, they confabulate.
Just because you haven't seen it hallucinate on these tasks doesn't mean it can't.
When I'm deciding what tool to use, my question is "does this need AI?", not "could AI solve this?" There's plenty of cases where its hard to write a deterministic script to do something, but if there is a deterministic option, why would you choose something that might give you the wrong answer? It's also more expensive.
The jq script or other script that an LLM generates is way easier to spot check than the output if you ask it to transform the data directly, and you can reuse it.