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saidnooneever • yesterday at 9:07 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

its a classical effect of having a hammer and recognising everything as a nail to whack. its pretty tricky to find a problem well suited to a tool like LLMs.

i programming stuff using LLM of which the resultant programs are deterministic and dont use LLMs or tokens is a better or easier approach to having gains. because the resulting program can be easier to use and doesnt cost a lot to run. Automations are a good target, or integratig libraries into other programs. tedious things u know well how to do but take time to do manually. then once done fix a problem or workflow that u need fixed by the solution yielded.

ive not seen 1 app that does calls to an LLM that i find useful, apart from harnesses that produce code (which is only recently becoming more appealing and might depend on how good and fast u can write code, at which im not the best nor the fastest.)


Replies

PAndreew • yesterday at 10:14 PM

My wife has to submit a bunch of translated documents for procurement processes. Noone really reads those but they are a hard requirement. These are usually in DOCX or sometimes PDF with tables, product images etc. So I built her a little applet which (after clicking two buttons) sends the XML or PDF to an LLM in chunks and it spits back the same structure but with translated text. Of course there are edge cases where it doesn’t work perfectly but I’d say it works 95% of the time in a good enough quality to submit them. Saves her roughly 0.5-1 hour per job and much cheaper than other alternatives.

dieselgate • yesterday at 9:40 PM

Recently laid off and not a big AI guy… but to illustrate your points:

Tailoring + proofing resumes to _manually_ apply to jobs is a great application of LLMs in my experience. But I wouldn’t want an AI to apply for jobs for me.

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