[mossTechnician]

> if you close a youtube browser tab with a comment half written it will pop up an `alert("You will lose your comment if you close this window")`. It does this if the comment is a 2 page essay or "asdfasdf". Ideally the alert would only happen if the comment seemed important but it would readily discard short or nonsensical input. That is really difficult to do in traditional software but is something an LLM could do with low effort.

I don't think that's a great example, because you can evaluate the length of the content of a text box with a one-line "if" statement. You could even expand it to check for how long you've been writing, and cache the contents of the box with a couple more lines of code.

An LLM, by contrast, requires a significant amount of disk space and processing power for this task, and it would be unpredictable and difficult to debug, even if we could define a threshold for "important"!

[mort96]

I think it's an excellent example to be honest. Most of the time whenever someone proposes some use case for a large language model that's not just being a chat bot, it's either a bad idea, or a decent idea that you'd do much better with something much less fancy (like this, where you'd obviously prefer some length threshold) than with a large language model. It's wild how often I've heard people say "we should have an AI do X" when X is something that's very obviously either a terrible idea or best suited for traditional algorithms.

Sort of like how most of the time when people proposed a non-cryptocurrency use for "blockchain", they had either re-invented Git or re-invented the database. The similarity to how people treat "AI" is uncanny.

[QuantumNomad_]

> It's wild how often I've heard people say "we should have an AI do X" when X is something that's very obviously either a terrible idea or best suited for traditional algorithms.

Likewise when smartphones were new, everyone and their mother was certain that random niche thing that made no sense as an app would be a perfect app and that if they could just get someone to make the app they’d be rich. (And of course ideally, the idea haver of the misguided idea would get the lions share of the riches, and the programmer would get a slice of pizza and perhaps a percentage or two of ownership if the idea haver was extra generous.)

[fragmede]

With Claude Code doing the implementing now, we'll have to see who gets which slice of pizza!

[reactordev]

Difference is now, that person with an idea, doesn’t need a programmer or anyone to share the pizza with. They are free to gorge on all 18” of it.

[johnnyanmac]

Well, until the other 10 people with that idea get a slice in. Likely speaking that 2 people get 7 slices of the 8 slice pizza, and the other 8 people fight over the last piece.

[mandevil]

The difference between "AI" and "linear regression" is whether you are talking to a VC or an engineer.

[frogperson]

I dont want every interaction or partial thought sent to OpenAI or Antropic for them to determine if it was "important" or not. That sounds terrifying and dystopic.