[hnlmorg]

We are chatting about maintaining a software project written in a software programming language. Not some theoretical strawman argument youve just dreamt up because others have rightly pointed out that you don’t need a LLM to parse the output of a 20KB command line program.

As I said before, I maintain a project like this. I also happen to work for a company that specialises in the use of generative AI. So I’m well aware of the power of LLMs as well as the problems of this very specific domain. The ideas you’ve expressed here are, at best, optimistic.

by the time you’ve solved all the little quirks of ML you’ll have likely invested far more time on your LLM then you would have if you’d just written a simple parser and, ironically, needed someone far more specialised to write the LLM than your average developer.

This simply isn’t a problem that needs a LLM chucked at it.

You don’t even need to write lexers and grammars to parse 99% of application output. Again, I know this because I’ve written such software.