[tasty_freeze]

Sometimes LLMs astonish me with what the code they can write. Other times I have to laugh or cry.

As an example, I asked claude 3.5 back when that was the latest to indent all the code in my file by four more spaces. The file was about 700 lines long. I got a busy spinner for two minutes then it said, "OK, first 50 lines done, now I'll do the rest" and got another busy spinner and it said, "this is taking too long. I'm going to write a program to do it", which of course it had no problem doing. The point is that it is superhuman at some things and completely brain-dead about others, and counting parens is one of those things I wouldn't expect it to be good at.

[nextos]

I think LLMs are great at compression and information retrieval, but poor at reasoning. They seem to work well with popular languages like Python because they have been trained with a massive amount of real code. As demonstrated by several publications, on niche languages their performance is quite variable.

[smackeyacky]

I used to find it better to shortcut the AI by asking it to write python to do a task. Claude 4.6 seems to do this without prompting.

Edit: working on a lot of legacy code that needs boring refactoring, which Claude is great at.

[lagniappe]

That's you at the time not knowing LLM fundamentals with regards to context management.

[tasty_freeze]

That was me at the time kicking the tires to understand what it was good at or not. If I actually wanted to indent a file by four spaces it would take me less time in my editor than to prompt the LLM to do it, even if the LLM had been capable of it.