this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
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Cherry picking the things it doesn’t do well is fine, but you shouldn’t ignore the fact that it DOES do some things easily also.
Like all tools, use them for what they’re good at.
I don't think it's cherry picking. Why would I trust a tool with way more complex logic, when it can't even prevent three crosses in a row? Writing pretty much any software that does more than render a few buttons typically requires a lot of planning and thinking and those models clearly don't have the capability to plan and think when they lose tic tac toe games.
Why would I trust a drill press when it can’t even cut a board in half?
A drill press (or the inventors) don't claim that it can do that, but with LLMs they claim to replace humans on a lot of thinking tasks. They even brag with test benchmarks, claim Bachelor, Master and Phd level intelligence, call them "reasoning" models, but still fail to beat my niece in tic tac toe, which by the way doesn't have a PhD in anything 🤣
LLMs are typically good in things that happened a lot during training. If you are writing software there certainly are things which the LLM saw a lot of during training. But this actually is the biggest problem, it will happily generate code that might look ok, even during PR review but might blow up in your face a few weeks later.
If they can't handle things they even saw during training (but sparsely, like tic tac toe) it wouldn't be able to produce code you should use in production. I wouldn't trust any junior dev that doesn't set their O right next to the two Xs.
Sure, the marketing of LLMs is wildly overstated. I would never argue otherwise. This is entirely a red herring, however.
I’m saying you should use the tools for what they’re good at, and don’t use them for what they’re bad at. I don’t see why this is controversial at all. You can personally decide that they are good for nothing. Great! Nobody is forcing you to use AI in your work. (Though if they are, you should find a new employer.)
Totally agree with that and I don't think anybody would see that as controversial. LLMs are actually good in a lot of things, but not thinking and typically not if you are an expert. That's why LLMs know more about the anatomy of humans than I do, but probably not more than most people with a medical degree.