3 ms·

LLMs are awful and untrustworthy at math on their own for sure, but I found out you can tell Claude to use bc and suddenly they're not so bad when they have a c

• imiric 1y ago
  You underestimate your abilities, and overestimate the LLM's. Which version of `bc` was the LLM trained on? Perhaps this is not so important for a stable tool that doesn't change much, but it's critical for many programs and programming libraries. I lost count of the number of times when an LLM generated code that doesn't work for the current version of the library I'm using. In some cases you can tell it to use a specific version, or even feed it the documentation for that version, but that often fails to correct the issue. And this is without considering the elephant in the room: hallucination. LLMs will often mix up or invent APIs that don't exist. Apologists will say that agents are the solution, and that feeding the error back to the LLM will fix it, but that is often not the case either. That might even make things worse by breaking something else, especially in large-context sessions.
  • pram 1y ago
    Oh yeah it’s still going to hallucinate eventually, 100%. My point is mostly you can take it from “absolutely useless” to “situationally useful” if you’re honest about its limitations and abilities. Nothing has convinced me that LLMs will ever be good at math on their own.