Simon Willison’s Weblog

24th September 2024 - Link Blog

XKCD 1425 (Tasks) turns ten years old today (via) One of the all-time great XKCDs. It's amazing that "check whether the photo is of a bird" has gone from PhD-level to trivially easy to solve (with a vision LLM, or CLIP, or ResNet+ImageNet among others).

The key idea still very much stands though. Understanding the difference between easy and hard challenges in software development continues to require an enormous depth of experience.

I'd argue that LLMs have made this even worse.

Understanding what kind of tasks LLMs can and cannot reliably solve remains incredibly difficult and unintuitive. They're computer systems that are terrible at maths and that can't reliably lookup facts!

On top of that, the rise of AI-assisted programming tools means more people than ever are beginning to create their own custom software.

These brand new AI-assisted proto-programmers are having a crash course in this easy-v.s.-hard problem.

I saw someone recently complaining that they couldn't build a Claude Artifact that could analyze images, even though they knew Claude itself could do that. Understanding why that's not possible involves understanding how the CSP headers that are used to serve Artifacts prevent the generated code from making its own API calls out to an LLM!