5th December 2023
A calculator has a well-defined, well-scoped set of use cases, a well-defined, well-scoped user interface, and a set of well-understood and expected behaviors that occur in response to manipulations of that interface.
Large language models, when used to drive chatbots or similar interactive text-generation systems, have none of those qualities. They have an open-ended set of unspecified use cases.
Recent articles
- One-shotting a Raccoon Heist game using Claude Fable 5 - 5th August 2026
- New release of LLM adds support for reasoning traces, OpenAI Responses, server-side tools, and smarter logging - 4th August 2026
- Stateless MCP has recaptured my interest (and inspired mcp-explorer and datasette-mcp) - 31st July 2026