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Comment by foobarqux | Hacker News Reader

I just don't seem to find this stuff as useful to me as people are portraying. Take the "extract URLs" example: I would just do

     curl -sL $URL | htmlq 'a' -a href

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Harder to run that on a phone. I built most of these little web apps so I could use them from Mobile Safari.

Also it doesn't look like htmlq can handle pages that render their content with JavaScript. If you want to do that you might find my shot-scraper CLI utility useful: https://shot-scraper.datasette.io/en/stable/javascript.html

    shot-scraper javascript https://simonwillison.net/ 'Array.from(document.links).map(a => a.href)'

I can point to similar problems even in CLI-target apps. In Nicholas Carlini's post for example he shows how LLMs helped him make curl parallel by piping to the "parallel" utility. That works but no sane person would do it given that curl has built-in parallel processing via the "-Z" flag which you could have found in 10 seconds by opening the man page. I'm sure this was an instance of a developer (truly) believing they became 10x more productive.

These aren't even the "hard" problems that are beyond the reach of LLMs today; they seem like things they should be able to do. It's just that, today, they just aren't achieving the spectacular results that many are claiming; it's mostly pretty crappy.

shot-scraper looks nice.

That's pretty happy path for one, and for two, how exactly are you doing it? Not by holding down a red button on your phone and talking into it, that's for sure.

For three, add one more subtle requirement to the task, and now you're reading awk manpages and trial-and-erroring perl oneliners.

Yeah, sure - if you have the memory that allows that sort of recall. For the rest of us, LLMs are like Alzheimer’s medication or eye glasses. Believe it or not, these types of esoteric commands are very difficult for some of us to remember - but AI is amazing at this sort thing (Unix commands, etc as well as trouble shooting them).

> Yeah, sure - if you have the memory that allows that sort of recall.

You don't memorize them. You learn the foundational knowledge (in this case how http works and the html format, and a bit of shell scripting), then read the manuals and compose the commands. And as days pass, you save interesting snippets somewhere. Then it becomes easier each time you interact with the tools.

Anyone would find ffmpeg or imagemagick daunting if they don't know anything about audio or graphics.

Enough with the gatekeeping.

I understand the fundamentals of how git works under the hood. But the cli commands are in no way shape or form, intuitive (just one example). But LLMs nail them every time when I forget.

How many varied tasks do you do with git? I keep books and manuals at hand for the one time I need them, not for continual consultation. I have alias for frequently used commands, functions for the complicated one and use magit for day to day operation (to continue with your example). Using LLMs is your choice and I don’t have any say in that. I don’t use them because they’re useless to me. What you may see as complicated may be a walk in the park for someone else.

I mean they may also make your memory worse if you always go straight for the llm instead of trying to remember.

I can't remember, was it Aristotle or Plato who said that about writing?

I'm pretty sure it was Socrates but I might be hallucinating

It was Socrates - and he was correct. When was the last time you met someone who could recite The Iliad from memory?

But more to the point ... in Phaedrus he's not talking about "who will memorize the Iliad now that we have the written word", he's talking about "can the written word _teach_". And the answer (as always) is "no and yes".

> and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem [275b] to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.

https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext... and https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1636/1636-h/1636-h.htm#link2....

Tons of people can recite the Bible and the Koran from memory.

But where do chatbots fit into this? Cribbing from your neighbor in an exam? Watching TV?

That might be a reasonable argument if the LLM suggested something similar to the command I posted instead of an incredibly complicated webapp.

As is it just spits out migraine-inducing "it-works-doesn't-it" solutions from someone starting to learn to program.

I get your point, but that doesn't exactly replicate the original tool which lets you just paste a chunk of rich text in.

And I would have had to use GPT to give me the syntax for that command line anyway :)

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