7 ms·

> mixed-technique approach I think my biggest annoyance with the way we rolled out AI is that nobody seemed to want to use it to augment already working soluti

> mixed-technique approach I think my biggest annoyance with the way we rolled out AI is that nobody seemed to want to use it to augment already working solutions. Just throw everything out and have an LLM do it instead.

NateEag 4mo ago
I recently saw a Claude skill that used Claude, with no tools, as a spell checker. I wanted to hurl my laptop out to the window.
- kangalioo 4mo ago
  What would be a better way to incorporate AI as a spell checker? In comparison to non-AI traditional tools, AI has the advantage of "understanding" the text, reducing the number of "stupid" mis-corrections. And its spelling correctness is usually already impeccable, so what is there to gain by interfacing it with traditional solutions, and how can it be achieved?
  - ceejayoz 4mo ago
    I am skeptical that AI brings any benefit to spell checking at all.
  - trollbridge 4mo ago
    AI can’t really spell check without risking changing the meaning of sentences. Spell checking was a solved problem before this.
    - applfanboysbgon 4mo ago
      Spellchecking is absolutely not a solved problem. I immediately disable spellchecking on every avenue it tries to approach because managing a bunch of dictionaries on every browser/device/application that has its own spellchecker for some godforsaken reason to not have squigglies spammed over every piece of jargon, slang, and slightly atypical spelling is incredibly annoying. I don't know how effective LLMs are, but it's difficult to imagine they can be worse than the existing regime, which is embarrassingly bad for the decades it's been around.
      - PaulHoule 4mo ago
        Human copy editors are less than perfect too. I hired one copy editor who I could not trust to be the last person who touched a document before it went out. I had a friend who wrote an article for the New York Times: the article made a lot of sense before she submitted it, but it was edited for length and style and it definitely read like a New York Times piece but didn't completely make sense.
      - quuxplusone 4mo ago
        An interesting idea I saw long ago in some book (I thought it was K&P's "Software Tools," or my second guess was K&R1, but neither of those panned out — a strong Mandela effect) was the clever idea of a whole-document spellchecker that works purely probabilistically, by histograms: you feed it a document, it tallies the trigraphs, and any trigraph that appears only rarely is flagged as a likely typo. This approach lets through unknown-but-realistic words like "antithematory" while flagging unrealistic words like "prisencolinensinainciusol" (because of its unlikely "ciu" and "ius" clusters) and "antthemaory" (because of "ntt" and "aor"). To make this approach work better, feed it a bunch of English text (or whatever language your document is in) before the document you really want to "spellcheck." Essentially this isn't a spell "checker" so much as a spell "linter" — it looks for antipatterns statistically associated with bugs, and reports the patterns for further investigation. If anyone knows where this trigraph-based "spellchecker" was first presented, I'd love to find out again.
        mattkrause 4mo ago
        That's uhh...a language model?
        serf 4mo ago
        It's a modeling of language, it's not structurally anything like an LLM.
        mattkrause 4mo ago
        It’s literally a trigram (character) language model. Check any NLP book from before 2015 or so. LLMs have more stuff bolted onto them (embeddings, RLHF) but the autoregressive core is a direct descendent of that sort of language model.
    - wat10000 4mo ago
      Only if the problem is declared to be whatever it is that spell checkers solve. As the classic joke goes, "Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken."
      - xoa 4mo ago
        >Only if the problem is declared to be whatever it is that spell checkers solve. The problem being misspelling, hence, "spell checker". Like, this seems pretty straightforward? Grammar checking if you cannot use the language properly is a pretty different problem space, and indeed has long existed and is exposed as a separate thing. And not just in fancy word processors either, if you go to something as simple as macOS TextEdit you'll see separate check boxes for "Check spelling as you type" vs "Check grammar with spelling". If someone wants to try out using LLMs for grammar no problem, but spell checking is purely about the mechanical and, importantly, deterministic aspect of typos or outright non-words. >As the classic joke goes, "Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken." There is a genuine touch of irony/meta in you using that here in this context. That sentence has no misspelled words, and importantly gets across the exact humorous meaning the human who wrote it intended. The joke literally only works because a human was able to make creative use of language. If you had an LLM agent posting for you to HN and it automatically changed that to: >As the classic joke goes, "My spellchecker works great but could use some grammar checking." Well, where would the joke be now!? This goes to the exact concern people have with powerful non-deterministic meaning-changing tools replacing deterministic meaning-preserving ones.
        applfanboysbgon 4mo ago
        I just fed this entire thread (excluding your comment pointing out the joke, and the text mentioning that it was a joke) to an LLM, and it did better than the dictionary spellchecker: corrected one real error, left my "squigglies" alone which was attacked by squigglies with the old-hat spellchecker, and specifically noted, without any prompting in that direction, that it left the joke spelling unchanged. It did not rewrite any sentences. I'm all for determinism where deterministic tools work, but the current implementations are so bad I can't blame people for turning to a non-deterministic program if it's still better on average.
    - intrasight 4mo ago
      If it's a solved problem, then why does my iPhone suck at it?
      - trollbridge 4mo ago
        Maybe it has a poor implementation. aspell works great. Back in the day I used some IBM employee written software on DOS that was a TSR that would spell check words for you in popular editors. In the 1990s every word processor had a decent spell checker. They all had the ability to add your own additional words.
        NateEag 4mo ago
        Agreed, aspell is noticeably better than many of the others I've used over the years. I suppose poor implementations of boring old deterministic spell-checking are a thing, too. Maybe that's some part of the disconnects in this thread.
    - bityard 4mo ago
      Strong disagree. One of the core strengths of LLMs from the beginning is that they are very good at NOT changing meaning, as long as your model isn't so small that it starts to get "dumb" and as long as your input fits in the context window. (Two known limitations that aren't always exposed to the end user in poorly-written applications.) Of course, LLMs are non-deterministic and do occasionally make mistakes, so you have to use them correctly and review their output. You shouldn't paste a doc into the web UI and tell it "fix all the mistakes and write the output to a new file." You should instead have it present each mistake and fix to the user as a diff and let the user approve or deny, either within the application or allowing the user to make their own edits. Never let it "rewrite" the whole document, that's the document-editing equivalent of giving OpenClaw root on your personal computer. Nothing good will come of it. Classic spell checkers can't detect homophones. E.g. "there" and "their." Grammar checkers can, but at least the ones that I have used also like to change the tone of my writing to sterile corporate PC speak. LLMs used for grammar checking have not, in my experience, meddled with my tone. (Although sometimes they try to admonish me for it!)
      - dragonwriter 4mo ago
        > Grammar checkers can, but at least the ones that I have used also like to change the tone of my writing to sterile corporate PC speak. Most grammar checker packages also include style checking, and the default options tend toward that style (because that’s the big market for them.) Most of them are also configurable, so you can disable style checking entirely while still checking grammar, or tweak which style rules are applied.
  - saynay 4mo ago
    AI certainly is the shiny new hammer, and it is tempting to see the world as nails. Traditional methods might not be perfect, but they also easily fit in the memory of even low power devices. Perhaps it isn't a problem worth burning a dollar of tokens for every spelling mistake.
  - sarchertech 4mo ago
    The fact that it produces correctly spelled words says nothing about it’s ability to find spelling mistakes or to correct them without errors like completely changing the word.
    - allears 4mo ago
      You mean errors like misusing "it's" when the right word is "its?"
  - Hizonner 4mo ago
    > What would be a better way to incorporate AI as a spell checker? Don't do a stupid thing like that in the first place. > In comparison to non-AI traditional tools, AI has the advantage of "understanding" the text, reducing the number of "stupid" mis-corrections. I doubt it, but if that's true, run a normal spell checker, and then give the output to your LLM to filter. > what is there to gain by interfacing it with traditional solutions, About a billionfold improvement in compute efficiency, and a lower error rate. > and how can it be achieved? 10 seconds of actual thought.
  - jlarocco 4mo ago
    >What would be a better way to incorporate AI as a spell checker? You just don't need AI to do spell checking. It's a waste of energy, bandwidth and tokens. It's like Java Enterprise Fizz-Buzz - 1000x more complicated than it needs to be and complete overkill. But at least you can tell your manager you're using AI!
- gedy 4mo ago
  I swear that so many AI usecases I see are: "I did not have the skill or realize that you can write a program for this obvious logic". I guess that works if you aren't a programmer or don't want to hire somebody, but then wtf would I pay for your service or product?
- mattkrause 4mo ago
  Isn't this pretty much why language models were invented? Pasting something directly into the chat interface seems weird, but if you could somehow just see where P(token | context) falls off a cliff, that's a pretty good hint that your writing has problem.
  - lambda 4mo ago
    Yeah, but for this use case you don't need Claude. You probably want a tuned lightweight small model that can run locally. Even Haiku is massive overkill for this use case.
    - kevin_thibedeau 4mo ago
      I've done it to check transcriptions of handwritten 19th century Quebec French. Is there a dedicated spell checker for that?
- julianlam 4mo ago
  This type of laziness isn't novel. Check out left pad or the two dozen other "utility" packages that could be done in a single line of code.
ahartmetz 4mo ago
Something something bitter lesson blah blah I think the bitter lesson is severely misapplied in the current situation: If progress from "just add more resources" is very slow, and a huge amount of money is at stake, continous work on hand-engineering can give a continuous and very valuable competitive advantage. The labs all seem to be going for AGI through bigger LLMs, and I am reasonably sure that it's not going to happen like that.
- irthomasthomas 4mo ago
  > The labs all seem to be going for AGI through bigger LLMs I don't know if this is still the case. Labs like anthropic and openai are spending a huge amount of their time on custom model wrappers. Something which they used to leave to their customers.
ajross 4mo ago
> nobody [wants to use AI] to augment already working solutions Plenty of people do, but that only produces a blog post that will get you to the front page of HN. If you want VCs to drop $40M on your head, you need to pretend to reinvent the world. Then, to further appease the rain gods, you need to sue the bloggers on the front page of HN who are challenging your world-changing narrative. Which will, heh, drop you on the front page of HN. Our community is, literally, eating itself at this point. There was a time when we actually took "make something people want" literally. Now it's just part of the fiction.
neutronicus 4mo ago
I've been frustrated with Copilot in this regard. I work on a large C++ codebase, with large files. Human developers jump around between files with the Visual Studio fuzzy search, set breakpoints to trace execution in the Debugger, use the IDE's refactoring tools. Microsoft's answer to this was to just ... expose none of this to their Agent Mode!? Replace the working semantic autocomplete with fucking lies!? Maybe it's changed, I haven't been paying that much attention after bouncing off of this. I've gotten mild acceleration from using gptel-mode in emacs, manually adding references to context, and having models do various mechanical transformations on code. And I've even had some limited success writing tools for it to do LSP lookups.
- xnorswap 4mo ago
  It frustrates me too, it really feels like the next breakthrough will be when someone gets agents working "natively" with LSP on large code-bases. Anthropic added LSP support to claude-code, but the current implementation is worse than useless, because any changes aren't reflected fast enough, so it's constantly working on outdated views / compilation caches, and it gets in a right muddle between its "internal" state / understanding in context, the real-world file, and the LSP. If it could just leverage LSP to apply refactorings it would be amazing, but it feels like the LSP can't keep up, and I don't know if that's an LSP problem or a claude problem. So we binned the LSP plugin and we're back to watching a machine find/replace, because while waiting on that is slower than LSP, it's a "Action => Wait" which the tooling understands, while LSP is "Possibly Wait for LSP to catch up => Action" which it doesn't understand nearly as well. I suspect the LSP plugins also need better skills that pair with them so it reaches for them more often. It hurts my soul to see it reach for find/replace to rename a class, complete with mistakes made in complex solutions where you might have name clashes in different namespaces. Something the LSP handles without problem, but can trip up an LLM.
  - bee_rider 4mo ago
    I wonder, is the problem here that LSP is updating too slow all the time? Or just that there’s a chance it will update very slow, and you never really know if you’ll hit that chance, so your model always has to do the “long time wait” just in case? It seems like it ought to be possible for LSP to report that it is still processing, in the latter case, somehow…
PyWoody 4mo ago
A few days ago someone on HN commented that a teammate uses Claude to search for text in files on their own computer. Buddy... There's Command-line Tools Can Be 235x Faster Than Your Hadoop Cluster and then there's Command-line Tools Can Be ∞ Faster Than Your AI.
- dylan604 4mo ago
  As snark, I've been using the phrase "ask GPT about it" for things that clearly do not need an LLM to be involved. The other day, I was on a zoom call and said it, only to see the present actually doing it. I hope my unmuted laugh wasn't too distracting.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
ACCount37 4mo ago
Way too much engineering effort to make something that might get leapfrogged by the next gen LLM. It's a tantalizing thing, but far too treacherous to actually go for it, most of the time.
- intrasight 4mo ago
  There are many domains where a hybrid of numeric and AI approaches would make sense. For example in those domains where there's already a rich practice of numeric tools such as with IC layout.
peteforde 4mo ago
Hey man, speak for yourself. It's never occurred to me to even try getting an LLM to design or layout a circuit for me. Instead, I have dozens or hundreds of chats in my history where I debate the merits of different parts for different tasks and scenarios, the nuances of decoupling strategies (package size vs deregulation), work out resistor network ratios from the reels I have on hand. Then being able to feed an LLM a datasheet and have it write a custom driver against the registers I need so that it does exactly what I want without the cognitive overhead of a buggy package with someone else's strong opinions about how a part should be used is amazing. Frontier models are incredibly good at electronics, and it's got nothing to do with what happens inside the EDA.
- nubinetwork 4mo ago
  Design, no... but I've definitely thought about letting one route traces... while autorouters work, I was hoping Claude could do matched traces better. At the time, it didn't want to generate the kicad pcbnew file though. /shrug
  - peteforde 4mo ago
    Everyone is different, but board layout is one area where I aggressively don't want any LLM input until such a time as it is as good at board layout as it is at refactoring code. We're still a ways off from that, and that's likely because board layout requires a much more nuanced perspective of the enclosure shape, power requirements, heat dissipation, RF... It's really not about placing ICs with caps nearby. I actually really enjoy that part anyhow. That's the fun part!
ChrisMarshallNY 4mo ago
> augment already working solutions That's exactly how I use it, but I'm just a geezer on his own, writing free software for people that can't pay for it.
jlarocco 4mo ago
Annoying, but not surprising. The future is using AI to do everything, and nobody gets funded saying they're taking a small step forward.
gmueckl 4mo ago
If its any consolation: once we've burnt the last crumb of coal, the last drop of oil and last bit of natural gas to fuel the AI overlords, that particular problem will take care of itself.

NateEag 4mo ago

I recently saw a Claude skill that used Claude, with no tools, as a spell checker. I wanted to hurl my laptop out to the window.

kangalioo 4mo ago
What would be a better way to incorporate AI as a spell checker? In comparison to non-AI traditional tools, AI has the advantage of "understanding" the text, reducing the number of "stupid" mis-corrections. And its spelling correctness is usually already impeccable, so what is there to gain by interfacing it with traditional solutions, and how can it be achieved?
- ceejayoz 4mo ago
  I am skeptical that AI brings any benefit to spell checking at all.
- trollbridge 4mo ago
  AI can’t really spell check without risking changing the meaning of sentences. Spell checking was a solved problem before this.
  - applfanboysbgon 4mo ago
    Spellchecking is absolutely not a solved problem. I immediately disable spellchecking on every avenue it tries to approach because managing a bunch of dictionaries on every browser/device/application that has its own spellchecker for some godforsaken reason to not have squigglies spammed over every piece of jargon, slang, and slightly atypical spelling is incredibly annoying. I don't know how effective LLMs are, but it's difficult to imagine they can be worse than the existing regime, which is embarrassingly bad for the decades it's been around.
    - PaulHoule 4mo ago
      Human copy editors are less than perfect too. I hired one copy editor who I could not trust to be the last person who touched a document before it went out. I had a friend who wrote an article for the New York Times: the article made a lot of sense before she submitted it, but it was edited for length and style and it definitely read like a New York Times piece but didn't completely make sense.
    - quuxplusone 4mo ago
      An interesting idea I saw long ago in some book (I thought it was K&P's "Software Tools," or my second guess was K&R1, but neither of those panned out — a strong Mandela effect) was the clever idea of a whole-document spellchecker that works purely probabilistically, by histograms: you feed it a document, it tallies the trigraphs, and any trigraph that appears only rarely is flagged as a likely typo. This approach lets through unknown-but-realistic words like "antithematory" while flagging unrealistic words like "prisencolinensinainciusol" (because of its unlikely "ciu" and "ius" clusters) and "antthemaory" (because of "ntt" and "aor"). To make this approach work better, feed it a bunch of English text (or whatever language your document is in) before the document you really want to "spellcheck." Essentially this isn't a spell "checker" so much as a spell "linter" — it looks for antipatterns statistically associated with bugs, and reports the patterns for further investigation. If anyone knows where this trigraph-based "spellchecker" was first presented, I'd love to find out again.
      - mattkrause 4mo ago
        That's uhh...a language model?
        serf 4mo ago
        It's a modeling of language, it's not structurally anything like an LLM.
        mattkrause 4mo ago
        It’s literally a trigram (character) language model. Check any NLP book from before 2015 or so. LLMs have more stuff bolted onto them (embeddings, RLHF) but the autoregressive core is a direct descendent of that sort of language model.
  - wat10000 4mo ago
    Only if the problem is declared to be whatever it is that spell checkers solve. As the classic joke goes, "Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken."
    - xoa 4mo ago
      >Only if the problem is declared to be whatever it is that spell checkers solve. The problem being misspelling, hence, "spell checker". Like, this seems pretty straightforward? Grammar checking if you cannot use the language properly is a pretty different problem space, and indeed has long existed and is exposed as a separate thing. And not just in fancy word processors either, if you go to something as simple as macOS TextEdit you'll see separate check boxes for "Check spelling as you type" vs "Check grammar with spelling". If someone wants to try out using LLMs for grammar no problem, but spell checking is purely about the mechanical and, importantly, deterministic aspect of typos or outright non-words. >As the classic joke goes, "Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken." There is a genuine touch of irony/meta in you using that here in this context. That sentence has no misspelled words, and importantly gets across the exact humorous meaning the human who wrote it intended. The joke literally only works because a human was able to make creative use of language. If you had an LLM agent posting for you to HN and it automatically changed that to: >As the classic joke goes, "My spellchecker works great but could use some grammar checking." Well, where would the joke be now!? This goes to the exact concern people have with powerful non-deterministic meaning-changing tools replacing deterministic meaning-preserving ones.
      - applfanboysbgon 4mo ago
        I just fed this entire thread (excluding your comment pointing out the joke, and the text mentioning that it was a joke) to an LLM, and it did better than the dictionary spellchecker: corrected one real error, left my "squigglies" alone which was attacked by squigglies with the old-hat spellchecker, and specifically noted, without any prompting in that direction, that it left the joke spelling unchanged. It did not rewrite any sentences. I'm all for determinism where deterministic tools work, but the current implementations are so bad I can't blame people for turning to a non-deterministic program if it's still better on average.
  - intrasight 4mo ago
    If it's a solved problem, then why does my iPhone suck at it?
    - trollbridge 4mo ago
      Maybe it has a poor implementation. aspell works great. Back in the day I used some IBM employee written software on DOS that was a TSR that would spell check words for you in popular editors. In the 1990s every word processor had a decent spell checker. They all had the ability to add your own additional words.
      - NateEag 4mo ago
        Agreed, aspell is noticeably better than many of the others I've used over the years. I suppose poor implementations of boring old deterministic spell-checking are a thing, too. Maybe that's some part of the disconnects in this thread.
  - bityard 4mo ago
    Strong disagree. One of the core strengths of LLMs from the beginning is that they are very good at NOT changing meaning, as long as your model isn't so small that it starts to get "dumb" and as long as your input fits in the context window. (Two known limitations that aren't always exposed to the end user in poorly-written applications.) Of course, LLMs are non-deterministic and do occasionally make mistakes, so you have to use them correctly and review their output. You shouldn't paste a doc into the web UI and tell it "fix all the mistakes and write the output to a new file." You should instead have it present each mistake and fix to the user as a diff and let the user approve or deny, either within the application or allowing the user to make their own edits. Never let it "rewrite" the whole document, that's the document-editing equivalent of giving OpenClaw root on your personal computer. Nothing good will come of it. Classic spell checkers can't detect homophones. E.g. "there" and "their." Grammar checkers can, but at least the ones that I have used also like to change the tone of my writing to sterile corporate PC speak. LLMs used for grammar checking have not, in my experience, meddled with my tone. (Although sometimes they try to admonish me for it!)
    - dragonwriter 4mo ago
      > Grammar checkers can, but at least the ones that I have used also like to change the tone of my writing to sterile corporate PC speak. Most grammar checker packages also include style checking, and the default options tend toward that style (because that’s the big market for them.) Most of them are also configurable, so you can disable style checking entirely while still checking grammar, or tweak which style rules are applied.
- saynay 4mo ago
  AI certainly is the shiny new hammer, and it is tempting to see the world as nails. Traditional methods might not be perfect, but they also easily fit in the memory of even low power devices. Perhaps it isn't a problem worth burning a dollar of tokens for every spelling mistake.
- sarchertech 4mo ago
  The fact that it produces correctly spelled words says nothing about it’s ability to find spelling mistakes or to correct them without errors like completely changing the word.
  - allears 4mo ago
    You mean errors like misusing "it's" when the right word is "its?"
- Hizonner 4mo ago
  > What would be a better way to incorporate AI as a spell checker? Don't do a stupid thing like that in the first place. > In comparison to non-AI traditional tools, AI has the advantage of "understanding" the text, reducing the number of "stupid" mis-corrections. I doubt it, but if that's true, run a normal spell checker, and then give the output to your LLM to filter. > what is there to gain by interfacing it with traditional solutions, About a billionfold improvement in compute efficiency, and a lower error rate. > and how can it be achieved? 10 seconds of actual thought.
- jlarocco 4mo ago
  >What would be a better way to incorporate AI as a spell checker? You just don't need AI to do spell checking. It's a waste of energy, bandwidth and tokens. It's like Java Enterprise Fizz-Buzz - 1000x more complicated than it needs to be and complete overkill. But at least you can tell your manager you're using AI!
gedy 4mo ago
I swear that so many AI usecases I see are: "I did not have the skill or realize that you can write a program for this obvious logic". I guess that works if you aren't a programmer or don't want to hire somebody, but then wtf would I pay for your service or product?
mattkrause 4mo ago
Isn't this pretty much why language models were invented? Pasting something directly into the chat interface seems weird, but if you could somehow just see where P(token | context) falls off a cliff, that's a pretty good hint that your writing has problem.
- lambda 4mo ago
  Yeah, but for this use case you don't need Claude. You probably want a tuned lightweight small model that can run locally. Even Haiku is massive overkill for this use case.
  - kevin_thibedeau 4mo ago
    I've done it to check transcriptions of handwritten 19th century Quebec French. Is there a dedicated spell checker for that?
julianlam 4mo ago
This type of laziness isn't novel. Check out left pad or the two dozen other "utility" packages that could be done in a single line of code.

ahartmetz 4mo ago

Something something bitter lesson blah blah I think the bitter lesson is severely misapplied in the current situation: If progress from "just add more resources" is very slow, and a huge amount of money is at stake, continous work on hand-engineering can give a continuous and very valuable competitive advantage. The labs all seem to be going for AGI through bigger LLMs, and I am reasonably sure that it's not going to happen like that.

irthomasthomas 4mo ago
> The labs all seem to be going for AGI through bigger LLMs I don't know if this is still the case. Labs like anthropic and openai are spending a huge amount of their time on custom model wrappers. Something which they used to leave to their customers.

ajross 4mo ago

> nobody [wants to use AI] to augment already working solutions Plenty of people do, but that only produces a blog post that will get you to the front page of HN. If you want VCs to drop $40M on your head, you need to pretend to reinvent the world. Then, to further appease the rain gods, you need to sue the bloggers on the front page of HN who are challenging your world-changing narrative. Which will, heh, drop you on the front page of HN. Our community is, literally, eating itself at this point. There was a time when we actually took "make something people want" literally. Now it's just part of the fiction.

neutronicus 4mo ago

I've been frustrated with Copilot in this regard. I work on a large C++ codebase, with large files. Human developers jump around between files with the Visual Studio fuzzy search, set breakpoints to trace execution in the Debugger, use the IDE's refactoring tools. Microsoft's answer to this was to just ... expose none of this to their Agent Mode!? Replace the working semantic autocomplete with fucking lies!? Maybe it's changed, I haven't been paying that much attention after bouncing off of this. I've gotten mild acceleration from using gptel-mode in emacs, manually adding references to context, and having models do various mechanical transformations on code. And I've even had some limited success writing tools for it to do LSP lookups.

xnorswap 4mo ago
It frustrates me too, it really feels like the next breakthrough will be when someone gets agents working "natively" with LSP on large code-bases. Anthropic added LSP support to claude-code, but the current implementation is worse than useless, because any changes aren't reflected fast enough, so it's constantly working on outdated views / compilation caches, and it gets in a right muddle between its "internal" state / understanding in context, the real-world file, and the LSP. If it could just leverage LSP to apply refactorings it would be amazing, but it feels like the LSP can't keep up, and I don't know if that's an LSP problem or a claude problem. So we binned the LSP plugin and we're back to watching a machine find/replace, because while waiting on that is slower than LSP, it's a "Action => Wait" which the tooling understands, while LSP is "Possibly Wait for LSP to catch up => Action" which it doesn't understand nearly as well. I suspect the LSP plugins also need better skills that pair with them so it reaches for them more often. It hurts my soul to see it reach for find/replace to rename a class, complete with mistakes made in complex solutions where you might have name clashes in different namespaces. Something the LSP handles without problem, but can trip up an LLM.
- bee_rider 4mo ago
  I wonder, is the problem here that LSP is updating too slow all the time? Or just that there’s a chance it will update very slow, and you never really know if you’ll hit that chance, so your model always has to do the “long time wait” just in case? It seems like it ought to be possible for LSP to report that it is still processing, in the latter case, somehow…

PyWoody 4mo ago

A few days ago someone on HN commented that a teammate uses Claude to search for text in files on their own computer. Buddy... There's Command-line Tools Can Be 235x Faster Than Your Hadoop Cluster and then there's Command-line Tools Can Be ∞ Faster Than Your AI.

dylan604 4mo ago
As snark, I've been using the phrase "ask GPT about it" for things that clearly do not need an LLM to be involved. The other day, I was on a zoom call and said it, only to see the present actually doing it. I hope my unmuted laugh wasn't too distracting.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

ACCount37 4mo ago

Way too much engineering effort to make something that might get leapfrogged by the next gen LLM. It's a tantalizing thing, but far too treacherous to actually go for it, most of the time.

intrasight 4mo ago
There are many domains where a hybrid of numeric and AI approaches would make sense. For example in those domains where there's already a rich practice of numeric tools such as with IC layout.

peteforde 4mo ago

Hey man, speak for yourself. It's never occurred to me to even try getting an LLM to design or layout a circuit for me. Instead, I have dozens or hundreds of chats in my history where I debate the merits of different parts for different tasks and scenarios, the nuances of decoupling strategies (package size vs deregulation), work out resistor network ratios from the reels I have on hand. Then being able to feed an LLM a datasheet and have it write a custom driver against the registers I need so that it does exactly what I want without the cognitive overhead of a buggy package with someone else's strong opinions about how a part should be used is amazing. Frontier models are incredibly good at electronics, and it's got nothing to do with what happens inside the EDA.

nubinetwork 4mo ago
Design, no... but I've definitely thought about letting one route traces... while autorouters work, I was hoping Claude could do matched traces better. At the time, it didn't want to generate the kicad pcbnew file though. /shrug
- peteforde 4mo ago
  Everyone is different, but board layout is one area where I aggressively don't want any LLM input until such a time as it is as good at board layout as it is at refactoring code. We're still a ways off from that, and that's likely because board layout requires a much more nuanced perspective of the enclosure shape, power requirements, heat dissipation, RF... It's really not about placing ICs with caps nearby. I actually really enjoy that part anyhow. That's the fun part!

ChrisMarshallNY 4mo ago

> augment already working solutions That's exactly how I use it, but I'm just a geezer on his own, writing free software for people that can't pay for it.

jlarocco 4mo ago

Annoying, but not surprising. The future is using AI to do everything, and nobody gets funded saying they're taking a small step forward.

gmueckl 4mo ago

If its any consolation: once we've burnt the last crumb of coal, the last drop of oil and last bit of natural gas to fuel the AI overlords, that particular problem will take care of itself.