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Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 1, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I expected LLMs to be good at categorizing freeform but mostly predictable responses like feedback forms and open-ended poll questions. But my naive attempt at dumping a spreadsheet with a few hundred such answers into an LLM ended with the narrowest categories possible, where all it managed to group together were the most obvious synonyms or the closest permutations of the word order, and without any counts to boot. My second attempt included giving it examples of how broad the categories should be, but then it used only those example categories and undercounted half of total entries, I didn't even bother checking the numbers of specific categories. At that point I decided not to waste time. In the future, any tips how on how to make one accomplish this task?

Which LLM? Did you simply copy paste the data or use a .csv file? Did you provide manually graded examples and clear instructions?