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Comment by danielheath | Hacker News Reader

IMO it's because they don't get burnt out by a lack of results.

After 5-6 consecutive approaches fail, I need a reason to think the next one might work out to stay motivated.

Claude will keep burning credits trying new approaches until something sticks. That's a huge advantage in a field where most of the things you try don't go anywhere.

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As an analogy, you're not going to cut your lawn by hand at the speed and slow pace that the smallest and weakest lawn mowing robot does. You're not going to cut your lawn with kitchen scissors. But the LLM will, metaphorically, be perfectly happy to cut your lawn with kitchen scissors as long as it has enough time/tokens to keep cranking away at it.

I had a discussion about this with a friend recently. I was using an LLM with a serial console that it wrote to allow us to share a connection to a Z80 computer running CP/M. I was having trouble with the assembler, it wouldn’t assemble in user 1 of a particular disk, so I asked the LLM for help. It debugged ASM.COM and the BDOS, walked through the source compared to memory dumps, basically banging its head on the wall for an hour or more, until it finally figured out and verified that my disk had a bad block. I never would have put in that much effort to find the root cause of the problem.

> Claude will keep burning credits trying new approaches until something sticks. That's a huge advantage in a field where most of the things you try don't go anywhere.

Unless you're on consumption billing.

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