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Tools: Code Is All You Need

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313 points Bogdanp | 1 comments | 03 Jul 25 10:51 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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simonw ◴[03 Jul 25 14:22 UTC] No.44455353[source]▶
Something I've realized about LLM tool use is that it means that if you can reduce a problem to something that can be solved by an LLM in a sandbox using tools in a loop, you can brute force that problem.

The job then becomes identifying those problems and figuring out how to configure a sandbox for them, what tools to provide and how to define the success criteria for the model.

That still takes significant skill and experience, but it's at a higher level than chewing through that problem using trial and error by hand.

My assembly Mandelbrot experiment was the thing that made this click for me: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/2/mandelbrot-in-x86-assem...

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1. rasengan ◴[03 Jul 25 14:29 UTC] No.44455435[source]▶
Makes sense.

I treat an LLM the same way I'd treat myself as it relates to context and goals when working with code.

"If I need to do __________ what do I need to know/see?"

I find that traditional tools, as per the OP, have become ever more powerful and useful in the age of LLMs (especially grep).

Furthermore, LLMs are quite good at working with shell tools and functionalities (heredoc, grep, sed, etc.).