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559 points Gricha | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.353s | source
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xnorswap ◴[] No.46233056[source]
Claude is really good at specific analysis, but really terrible at open-ended problems.

"Hey claude, I get this error message: <X>", and it'll often find the root cause quicker than I could.

"Hey claude, anything I could do to improve Y?", and it'll struggle beyond the basics that a linter might suggest.

It suggested enthusiastically a library for <work domain> and it was all "Recommended" about it, but when I pointed out that the library had been considered and rejected because <issue>, it understood and wrote up why that library suffered from that issue and why it was therefore unsuitable.

There's a significant blind-spot in current LLMs related to blue-sky thinking and creative problem solving. It can do structured problems very well, and it can transform unstructured data very well, but it can't deal with unstructured problems very well.

That may well change, so I don't want to embed that thought too deeply into my own priors, because the LLM space seems to evolve rapidly. I wouldn't want to find myself blind to the progress because I write it off from a class of problems.

But right now, the best way to help an LLM is have a deep understanding of the problem domain yourself, and just leverage it to do the grunt-work that you'd find boring.

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1. ljm ◴[] No.46238500[source]
I am basically rawdogging Claude these days, I don’t use MCPs or anything else, I just lay down all of the requirements and the suggestions and the hints, and let it go to work.

When I see my colleagues use an LLM they are treating it like a mind reader and their prompts are, frankly, dogshit.

It shows that articulating a problem is an important skill.