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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   3247 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 10, 2025

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How do you all interact with LLMs?

I’ve seen a few articles recently noting the rise of AI as a buddy / therapist or whatever. It’s usually beside the point of the article but an implicit notion is that lot of folks regularly ‘chat’ with AI as if it were a person.

Which I find baffling. Outside of the very early novelty, I find this way of interacting extremely boring and tedious, and generally find the fact that AI wants to get conversational with me a general frustrater.

If I’m not using AI as a utility ‘write X, troubleshoot Y, give me steps for Z’, and I’m using it recreationally / casually, it’s more akin to web surfing or browsing Wikipedia than chatting on a forum or whatever. I will use it as an open format encyclopedia and explicitly not as a conversationalist sounding board. And i genuinely find negative value in the fact that the former is constantly interrupted with the attempt to be the latter.

So my question is again, how far outside of the grain am I?

I have a few use cases.

  • Shitposting. By far the most value I get out of LLMs, to be honest - asking ChatGPT to generate a story where a friend had a steamy romance with Optimus Prime (and then sending it to said friend) had me giggling for like an hour after.
  • Spanish practice. I hold LLMs at arms' length because of the way they work (being based around predicting what the next token will be rather than actual understanding of the problem domain), but that approach works just fine for language because it's how we learn language. So I have a lot more willingness to accept the methodology in this problem domain. Plus I don't have any other chances to practice Spanish (cause it isn't socially acceptable to just go up to people who look Latino and talk Spanish to them), so even if it's flawed it's the best I have.
  • Generating bash scripts at work. A bash script should be very short (10-20 lines), which means LLMs tend to perform better, and it's easy for me to check at a glance (or at worst, check the syntax is correct in the shell). That said as soon as you get outside bash syntax, there be dragons - LLMs do not (in my experience) do well with things like generating curl requests for vendor APIs. The basic syntax is almost always correct though, which is useful to me because I loathe writing bash.
  • Similarly to the above, generating example code for APIs that I know well enough to recognize at a glance if it's correct, but not well enough to write myself without having to poke through the docs. For example, the python threads API. I can ask an LLM to generate a script doing X with threads, and I know instantly whether it's correct, but it would take me probably 30 minutes of poking at the threading docs to write it myself.

All in all, not a ton of actual value for me, but it is non-zero value. Unfortunately LLMs still fall over pretty hard when I try to hand them things that are more challenging for me. For example, recently I asked ChatGPT to do some weird conditional thing in Terraform (which turned out to be impossible as far as I can tell), and instead of saying "that's not possible" (useful, would've saved me a lot of time going down a bad path) it kept hallucinating code which was very sensible and would be nice if it worked, but isn't actually valid syntax. This is unfortunate because that's where the real value would be - I don't need or want an LLM to write code which I can very easily write myself (faster than it'll take me to check the LLM output), but I would like it to assist with things that are on the edges of my subject matter knowledge. Alas, that doesn't really work well right now, but I do get some minor value from the cases I mentioned.

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