alt Hacker News> Is this seriously so? Have you never seen anything helpful from an LLM?
No, not at all. I may be using it wrong.
I put in "write me a library that decodes network packets in <format I'm working with>" and it had no idea where to start.
What part of it is it supposed to do? I don't want to do any more typing than I have to.
Replies
linhns • yesterday at 5:01 PM
Well, if you ask it to write a library at the start, it's likely it will not do that well. Start small, spoon feed some examples.
You're right, you are using it wrong. An LLM can read code faster than you can, write code faster than you can, and knows more things than you do. By "you" I mean you, me, and anyone with a biological brain.
Where LLMs are behind humans is depth of insight. Doing anything non-trivial requires insight.
The key to effectively using LLMs is to provide the insight yourself, then let the LLM do the grunt work. Kind of like paint by numbers. In your case, I would recommend some combination of defining the API of the library you want yourself manually, thinking through how you would implement it and writing down the broad strokes of the process for the LLM, and collecting reference materials like a format spec, any docs, the code that's creating these packets, and so on.