alt Hacker NewsFor sure. The more specialized or obscure of things you have to do, the less LLMs help you.
Building a simple marketing website? Probably don’t waste your time - an LLM will probably be faster.
Designing a new SLAM algorithm? Probably LLMs will spin around in circles helplessly. That being said, that was my experience several years ago… maybe state of the art has changed in the computer vision space.
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Specialized is probably not the word I'd use, because llms are generally useful to understand more specialized / obscure topics. For example I've never randomly heard people talking about the dicom standard, llms have no trouble with it.
Several years ago is ancient with the rate of advancement that LLMs have had recently
> Building a simple marketing website? Probably don’t waste your time - an LLM will probably be faster.
This is actually where I would be most reluctant to use an LLM. Your website represents your product, and you probably don’t want to give it the scent of homogenized AI slop. People can tell.
> The more specialized or obscure of things you have to do, the less LLMs help you.
I've been impressed by how this isn't quite true. A lot of my coding life is spent in the popular languages, which the LLMs obviously excel at.
But a random dates-to-the-80s robotics language (Karel)? I unfortunately have to use it sometimes, and Claude ingested a 100s of pages long PDF manual for the language and now it's better at it than I am. It doesn't even have a compiler to test against, and still it rarely makes mistakes.
I think the trick with a lot of these LLMs is just figuring out the best techniques for using them. Fortunately a lot of people are working all the time to figure this out.