Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

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"if you need to go out of your way to find an example of correct usage of the api to paste into the prompt, why are you even bothering?"

Because it's faster.

Here's an example: https://tools.simonwillison.net/ocr

That's an entirely client-side web page you can use to open a PDF which then converts every page to an image (using PDF.js), then runs each image through the Tesseract.js OCR program and lets you copy out the resulting text.

I built the first version of that in about 5 minutes while paying attention to a talk at a conference, by pasting in examples of PDF.js and Tesseract.js usage. Here's that transcript: https://gist.github.com/simonw/6a9f077bf8db616e44893a24ae1d3...

I wrote more about that process here, including the prompts I used: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Mar/30/ocr-pdfs-images/

That's why I'm bothering: I can produce useful software in just a few minutes, while only paying partial attention to what the LLM is doing for me.

That's a nice little self contained example. I have yet to see this approach work for the day job: a larger codebase with complex inter-dependencies, where the solution isn't so easily worded (make the text box pink) and where the resulting code is reviewed and tested by one's peers.

We actually had to make a rule at work that if you use an LLM to create an PR and can't explain the changes without using more LLMs, you can't submit the PR. I've seen it almost work - code that looks right but does a bunch of unnecessary stuff, and then it required a real person (me) to clean it up and ends up taking just as much time as if it were just written correctly the first time.

That's one of my personal rules for LLM usage too: "Don't commit code you couldn't explain to someone else" - https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jul/14/pycon/#pycon-2024.062....

It's faster if all you're concerned with can fit in a static html file but what about for more complex projects?

I've struggled with getting any productivity benefits beyond single-file contexts. I've started playing with aider in an attempt to handle more complex workflows and multi-file editing but keep running into snags and end up spinning my wheels fighting my tools instead of making forward progress...

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