[mark_l_watson]

Nice! I use various LLMs many times a day as a limited coding tool and something to bounce ideas off of, and it is impossible to not think about how LLMs work and what their limitations are.

I tried just asking Claude Sonet to solve the Cheryl’s Birthday word problem, changing the dates. Pretty cool that it can solve it as a word problem, and LLMs will keep getting better at coding.

As a slight tangent: I used a combination of Gemini, GPT-4o, and Claude last week to write Common Lisp code for a simple RDF data store and the subset of SPARQL queries that I thought I would need in embedded Common Lisp applications. This process was far from automatic: I initially provided almost two pages of English instructions, and I had to help debug non-working code by adding debug statements and then show the models the code with print statements and the new output. I also did the optional thing of asking for stylistic changes. TLDR: saved me time and I liked the final code.

I always enjoy it when people like Peter and Karpathy write relatively simple code to share ideas. I am a fairly good coder (I had the meaningless title Master Software Engineer at Capital One) but I like to read other people’s code, and I must admit that I spend more time reading code on GitHub than I spend reading technical papers.