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How good do you think a human brain is at doing this if you simply provided the contents of the file as a string of characters (i.e. not in a text editor with l
by avalys 1y ago
How good do you think a human brain is at doing this if you simply provided the contents of the file as a string of characters (i.e. not in a text editor with line breaks rendered, etc.)?
- digianarchist 1y agoI think computers are good at counting lines delimited by newline characters.
- t-3 1y agoWhy are you comparing LLM's to a human brain? Software should integrate software when solving problems. It's completely reasonable to expect an LLM given a "count lines" problem to just pipe the text through wc -l.
- mhh__ 1y agowhich they will do I'd imagine after being told they have access to a shell
- selcuka 1y agoMost LLMs have access to such tools. Well, maybe not a Unix shell, but something similar. This is from GPT 4.5's system prompt [1]: python When you send a message containing Python code to python, it will be executed in a stateful Jupyter notebook environment. python will respond with the output of the execution or time out after 60.0 seconds. The drive at '/mnt/data' can be used to save and persist user files. Internet access for this session is disabled. Do not make external web requests or API calls as they will fail. [1] https://github.com/0xeb/TheBigPromptLibrary/blob/main/SystemPrompts/OpenAI/gpt45_system_prompt_03052025.md https://github.com/0xeb/TheBigPromptLibrary/blob/main/System...
- tylersmith 1y agoAn LLM itself can't use wc. Coding agents like Claude Code or Cursor will call out to command line tools for this kind of problem when the LLM detects it.
- selcuka 1y agoWell, maybe not wc directly, but they have access to sandboxed Python environments. It must be trivial for an LLM to write the Python code that calculates this. I don't understand why Gemini insists that it can count the lines itself, instead of falling back to its Python tool [1]. [1] https://github.com/elder-plinius/CL4R1T4S/blob/main/GOOGLE/Gemini-2.5-Pro-04-18-2025.md https://github.com/elder-plinius/CL4R1T4S/blob/main/GOOGLE/G...