4 ms·

My duties as a data scientist and forensic investigator involve writing lots of "little toy apps" for ETL and analysis. BTW, why the disparaging reference to "

My duties as a data scientist and forensic investigator involve writing lots of "little toy apps" for ETL and analysis. BTW, why the disparaging reference to "little toy apps"?

mvdtnz 2y ago
How would you refer to the example apps in the OP's link? They are almost definitionally toy apps, and definitely little (a handful of pages of code including all of the HTML).
skydhash 2y ago
It's related to this: https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/ As a programmer (which is the requisite to build such tools even with LLMs), I have a plethora of tools to do the tasks, what I choose and how much time I invested in in that depends on something similar to this chart, but with an added dimension: interest. Take for example the URL extraction. For one single occasion, I'd probably use VIM and macros to quickly do it. If it were many pages, I'd write a script. If it were infrequent, but recurrent, I'd take the time to write a better script and would only write a web page if the use case was shared with other people or if I wanted a cross platform solution. I believe the first question one should ask before building is why. That leads you to find a better UX than shoehorning everything inside a web app.
- IggleSniggle 2y ago
  I 100% agree with the point you are making. The only aspect that obscures it is that paying employers will happily pay to support interests that are, on inspection, a waste of time. In that aspect, I am hopeful. Maybe if "waste of time" activities are commoditized, "professionals" can instead focus on "what is important," whatever that might be.
  - skydhash 2y ago
    I don’t mind if my employer bought a subscription. But my personal motto if that if I have to do something multiple time, it should take less and less time. I reuse code heavily (which is why I learned vim as it makes that fluid). And that’s where LLMs becomes useless because they need the entire context to generate something. Which means I have to type it out for them in addition to what I want. And the whole thing becomes a drag. Maybe Cursor and the likes could help, but the code is only half the story, there are things like protocols, messages format, specs,… What LLMs promise is endless drag. I try to structure my work to ensure that the final velocity is high.
    - simonw 2y ago
      I copy and paste code examples into LLMs all the time. They're extremely good at figuring out which parts of the context are relevant, so I don't find myself needing to do any editing at all - I find the right example, paste it in and add my prompt at the end. This app for example - which runs OCR against PDF files entirely in the browser - was assembled by pasting in an example of PDF.js usage and an example of Tesseract.js usage and having it figure out the rest: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Mar/30/ocr-pdfs-images/ https://simonwillison.net/2024/Mar/30/ocr-pdfs-images/
      - skydhash 2y ago
        While I applaud the result, it's again one of the thing that would be a quick script if it were only for my personal usage. Because I wouldn't bother with making it user friendly as I'm the single user. The kind of project I work on is more like this: Build an Android app for a quiz game. The quiz takes a list of random question from a set. Each set is a package that can be installed and upgraded when online. While the app is free, there is an activation code to be able to download the main packages. The app should work offline except for the activation and downloading packages. It also should notify when a new version is ready for a package. etc... I don't know if LLMs could have helped me at the time (pre 2020), but I doubt it. Not because the code was complex, but mostly how cohesive the whole thing should be while taking care they're not tightly coupled and be maintainable by a single person. The IDE was a great helper once I got the design and the architecture outlined, mostly because it was deterministic and I already know what the end result should be.
sigh_again 2y ago
>BTW, why the disparaging reference to "little toy apps"? It's an unmaintainable, single use piece of software (that doesn't even implement the features, it just glues together already existing code) that any CS student could write in a week. Congrats on getting a really fast CS student I guess ? Not to mention the fact that perfectly viable, better alternatives are available in many places. It's like me nailing two 2x4s together to make a shelf. Yeah, sure, I made it myself and I didn't need any woodworking knowledge, but let's just hope I don't put grandma's heavy china on it.
- IggleSniggle 2y ago
  As a professional 2x4 nailer and gluer, I assure you that I have a ton more deliverables for my client. The downside is that now I actually have to put some thought into my work; you know, put some engineering work into it. The upside is that I can produce a shit-ton of one-shot code in record time, so I've got time to face the downside.
- williamcotton 2y ago
  I had a Claude Project write a number of CLI tools that interact, eg search_documents "search term" --bm25 --table-prefix some_project | fulltext -hl -v | less search_documents "search term" --bm25 --table-prefix some_project | metadata It inserts documents by piping paths into another script, eg, find /some/path/*.pdf | insert_documents --table-prefix some_project The documents end up in a Postgres database with pg_search bm25, tsvector, and semantic embeddings (from a local model). I would estimate that I only wrote 5% of the code in the project with the rest coming from the LLM. Sure, it's just a few hundred lines of code but it's been stable and helpful to get through some very large tranches of discovery material.
  - simonw 2y ago
    I had Claude write me a Bash script for running prompts (and images) against Google Gemini this morning - I really like it for Bash, because I never committed any of the Bash idioms to memory myself. https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/prompt-gemini https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/prompt-gemini

My duties as a data scientist and forensic investigator involve writing lots of "little toy apps" for ETL and analysis. BTW, why the disparaging reference to "little toy apps"?

mvdtnz 2y ago

How would you refer to the example apps in the OP's link? They are almost definitionally toy apps, and definitely little (a handful of pages of code including all of the HTML).

skydhash 2y ago

It's related to this: https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/ As a programmer (which is the requisite to build such tools even with LLMs), I have a plethora of tools to do the tasks, what I choose and how much time I invested in in that depends on something similar to this chart, but with an added dimension: interest. Take for example the URL extraction. For one single occasion, I'd probably use VIM and macros to quickly do it. If it were many pages, I'd write a script. If it were infrequent, but recurrent, I'd take the time to write a better script and would only write a web page if the use case was shared with other people or if I wanted a cross platform solution. I believe the first question one should ask before building is why. That leads you to find a better UX than shoehorning everything inside a web app.

IggleSniggle 2y ago
I 100% agree with the point you are making. The only aspect that obscures it is that paying employers will happily pay to support interests that are, on inspection, a waste of time. In that aspect, I am hopeful. Maybe if "waste of time" activities are commoditized, "professionals" can instead focus on "what is important," whatever that might be.
- skydhash 2y ago
  I don’t mind if my employer bought a subscription. But my personal motto if that if I have to do something multiple time, it should take less and less time. I reuse code heavily (which is why I learned vim as it makes that fluid). And that’s where LLMs becomes useless because they need the entire context to generate something. Which means I have to type it out for them in addition to what I want. And the whole thing becomes a drag. Maybe Cursor and the likes could help, but the code is only half the story, there are things like protocols, messages format, specs,… What LLMs promise is endless drag. I try to structure my work to ensure that the final velocity is high.
  - simonw 2y ago
    I copy and paste code examples into LLMs all the time. They're extremely good at figuring out which parts of the context are relevant, so I don't find myself needing to do any editing at all - I find the right example, paste it in and add my prompt at the end. This app for example - which runs OCR against PDF files entirely in the browser - was assembled by pasting in an example of PDF.js usage and an example of Tesseract.js usage and having it figure out the rest: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Mar/30/ocr-pdfs-images/ https://simonwillison.net/2024/Mar/30/ocr-pdfs-images/
    - skydhash 2y ago
      While I applaud the result, it's again one of the thing that would be a quick script if it were only for my personal usage. Because I wouldn't bother with making it user friendly as I'm the single user. The kind of project I work on is more like this: Build an Android app for a quiz game. The quiz takes a list of random question from a set. Each set is a package that can be installed and upgraded when online. While the app is free, there is an activation code to be able to download the main packages. The app should work offline except for the activation and downloading packages. It also should notify when a new version is ready for a package. etc... I don't know if LLMs could have helped me at the time (pre 2020), but I doubt it. Not because the code was complex, but mostly how cohesive the whole thing should be while taking care they're not tightly coupled and be maintainable by a single person. The IDE was a great helper once I got the design and the architecture outlined, mostly because it was deterministic and I already know what the end result should be.

sigh_again 2y ago

>BTW, why the disparaging reference to "little toy apps"? It's an unmaintainable, single use piece of software (that doesn't even implement the features, it just glues together already existing code) that any CS student could write in a week. Congrats on getting a really fast CS student I guess ? Not to mention the fact that perfectly viable, better alternatives are available in many places. It's like me nailing two 2x4s together to make a shelf. Yeah, sure, I made it myself and I didn't need any woodworking knowledge, but let's just hope I don't put grandma's heavy china on it.

IggleSniggle 2y ago
As a professional 2x4 nailer and gluer, I assure you that I have a ton more deliverables for my client. The downside is that now I actually have to put some thought into my work; you know, put some engineering work into it. The upside is that I can produce a shit-ton of one-shot code in record time, so I've got time to face the downside.
williamcotton 2y ago
I had a Claude Project write a number of CLI tools that interact, eg search_documents "search term" --bm25 --table-prefix some_project | fulltext -hl -v | less search_documents "search term" --bm25 --table-prefix some_project | metadata It inserts documents by piping paths into another script, eg, find /some/path/*.pdf | insert_documents --table-prefix some_project The documents end up in a Postgres database with pg_search bm25, tsvector, and semantic embeddings (from a local model). I would estimate that I only wrote 5% of the code in the project with the rest coming from the LLM. Sure, it's just a few hundred lines of code but it's been stable and helpful to get through some very large tranches of discovery material.
- simonw 2y ago
  I had Claude write me a Bash script for running prompts (and images) against Google Gemini this morning - I really like it for Bash, because I never committed any of the Bash idioms to memory myself. https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/prompt-gemini https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/prompt-gemini