Hacker News Reader

Comment by armchairhacker | Hacker News Reader

LLMs. I’d be surprised if there’s a tech support problem they can’t solve. If so, it’s probably so interesting you can write a blog post about it and/or post it to HN.

View on HN

I have yet to encounter the tech problem they can solve. LLMs really suck at troubleshooting, they love to go on esoteric tangents that are unlikely to succeed and then get hung up there.

You must be superhumanly bad at using this class of tool. They work pretty well for troubleshooting, and can be told to share their sources. This has allowed me to fix all sorts of issues I wouldn't have been able to without 50+ minutes of searching.

For questions about Apple products, I've often had multiple models answer by websearching discussions.apple.com.

But the solutions on the Apple Support Community are often inaccurate, and I've often seen models confidently parrot those inaccurate solutions.

s/But/And/

Any examples of actual problems solved?

Anecdotally OTOH:

- Claude Code fixed a broken Xcode installation that caused strange linker errors

- Claude (demonstratably) removed spyware from and declutterd my grandmas’s computer

LLMs are great at hallucinating menu options that dont exist and entire features that dont exist just to get to the end. Have fun with that.

Have you used recent frontier models? They can troubleshoot and fix your machine themselves.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com