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Asking an LLM to analyze data directly doesn’t work. But they’re great at writing scripts to analyze (and visualize) data. Anthropic just figured this out last week and gave Claude a mode that does that for you.

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This. I only ask LLMs to summarize non-critical stuff, i.e. just give me a general summary of all the work done over the past week.

If I were in need of hard analytics you can be damn sure I'd have it build a tool with a solid suite of tests following a rigorous process to ensure the outputs are sound. That's the difference between engineering and vibing.

Yes, you have to calibrate the effort to the task, you can't just blindly vibecode it. But if you treat it like a new college hire who still remembers their stats course, rather than a senior analyst who will just come back with the right answer, you can do some pretty high-level stuff that's trustworthy. It's so fast that it's no problem to double/triple check everything and even do it with multiple methods.

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