💡 Throwaway tools have no excuse for bad UX any longer
Now that LLMs have gotten relatively consistent at producing quality code in one shot (depending on the size & type of problem), I’m having to retrain my brain to realize that I should:
- Be making many more throwaway one-off tools
- I should care about the UX of them since it’s basically free to invest an extra 1 minute in adding those nice touches into the prompt
A simple example from work
I could have spent a while digging in a raw CSV to “vibecheck” the data that was coming back from a generative process. That’s how I would have done it in the past.
Instead, I had an LLM write a Python script which turned the CSV into an interactive HTML page and including a bunch of extra sorting & quality of life improvements which surfaced insights I am not confident I would have noticed on my own, or I wouldn’t have invested the human time & energy to find them if the tooling hadn’t surfaced it.
Something like this also has very little risk from hallucinations or bad code, since they are often read operations, and/or the scripts will be acting on code in version control so you can revert any weird outcomes.
I will never use that specific script again, and that is OK - though the hoarder in me is sad because he wants to find a re-use for everything.
Update 3/13
I heard Patio11 make a similar comment on his recent podcast episode on inference engineering . I love his word choice of “economically irrational”.
“You can ask them to write software that would have been economically irrational to write before—cases where the expected lifetime of that software is anywhere from a day down to a single execution” - Patrick McKenzie