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140 points FinnLobsien | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0.878s | source
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Workaccount2 ◴[] No.44378741[source]
I'm a non-tech worker in a non-tech industry, let me state two things:

- Software today is written to cover as many use cases with as many features to target as many users a possible.

- End users very often only use a tiny slice of the program's capabilities, but still pay for the entire program.

This creates a situation where the people writing software see it as a monumental undertaking to get good functional programs (it is), and end users see programs as having annoying learning curves with lots of bloat and "unnecessary" features.

LLMs do an excellent job of fixing this for end users because it allows them to easily create a program that does the handful of tasks that they normally need to use MegaSoftware for. And it's tailor made exactly for the use case. And the LLM can tell you exactly how to use it.

I can give a brief example where I used gemini to create a CAD file transposition tool that utilized a simple GUI tailor made for the files my company works with. This allowed us to forgo a (very) expensive CAD software package to work through converting our archive of files. A probably 2M LOC program could be skipped because we only needed 3k LOC functionality.

I really cannot stress enough how often this is the case, and why SWEs see LLMs as weak tools while end users see them as gods.

There will still be a need for huge software packages in the future, but I know I never again have to pay for a huge class of "here is a large solution space that covers your small scope problem" software.

To bring it home, loveable understands this, an sees that the futures has lots of non-tech people "writing" software. Standard IDEs are not the tools your mom will use to make a "Friends and family birthday reminder" app.

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1. x0x0 ◴[] No.44379459[source]
I don't disagree with the thrust, but I've recently cleaned some of those up.

One example: LLMs aren't smart enough to do things like properly manage zip codes with leading zeros. It was round tripping strings through an integer representation and corrupting them. The users did notice, but did not have the vocabulary/concepts to explain. To them, sometimes zipcodes get corrupted because inscrutable reasons (tm).

chatgpt also authored a bash script that would have blown away a chunk of my drive if any paths had a space in them. :shrug:

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2. lubujackson ◴[] No.44381139[source]
Fun thing I noticed is converting a CSV to XLSX in Excel also drops leading 0s from zip codes...
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3. fuzzy_biscuit ◴[] No.44387005[source]
Most spreadsheet software does that because the zips are parsed as integers, not strings . Prefix numerical fields that may contain leading zeros with a non-numerical character/word and save yourself the pain of late discovery! You can just find and replace after it goes in successfully.

Spoken as someone that experienced the same pain years ago in local SEO data that made it way too far before discovery...

4. layer8 ◴[] No.44391952[source]
You need to select the correct column data format in the Text Import Wizard: https://filestore.community.support.microsoft.com/api/images...