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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

That was one of the themes of my article: LLMs are power-user tools, mis-sold as "easy to use". To get great results out of them you need to invest a whole lot of under-documented and under-appreciated effort. https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/llms-in-2024/#llms-som...

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It’s not just that you need to be a power user (I certainly am), you also need to be fine with nondeterminism and typing a lot of prose, instead of doing everything with keyboard shortcuts and CLI commands, with reproducible outcomes. It’s a different mode of operation and interaction, requiring a different predisposition to some degree.

unless you can type faster than you can talk, (which some people can), stop typing and start dictating. aider has a /voice command for a reason.

I don't use it exclusively, but damn does it help in the right places.

Can you elaborate, or give some examples? I am having trouble imagining in which situations that would be useful because I tend to put a lot of thought into defining the right prompt before sending it over.

Exactly! I don’t like talking or writing or explaining.

My mind generally uses language as little as possible, I have no inner monologue running in the background.

Greatly prefer something deterministic to random bs popping up without the ability of recognizing it.

I don’t like llms but sometimes use them as autocomplete or to generate words, like a template for a letter or boilerplate scripts, never for actual information (à la google).

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