@MaddieM4 @glyph yes, a thing I've been saying a lot is that someone resorting to LLMs to solve a problem seems pretty well correlated with the problem being one that shouldn't have existed in the first place.

Last year I talked to someone who said a large and tedious part of his job used to be transcribing tabular data out of nicely typeset PDF manuals into a machine-readable representation that can be fed to software. And then he started getting an LLM to do that for him.

But the PDFs were generated by another part of the same company! Steam came out of my ears. Why the hell is the company making life difficult for _themselves_ in that way in the first place? The people creating the data should provide it in a machine-readable format _already_, so that nobody has to convert it back into one!

In fact they ought to have been doing that all along. The red flag of "this job was so tedious I outsourced it to an LLM" _shouldn't_ have been necessary. The fact that you were making life pointlessly difficult for other humans should have been enough. But I guess a lot of this kind of nonsense exists in the world just because organisational boundaries hide the costs to _this_ department from _that_ department who caused them.

(Also, with the right tools – I quite like the Python 'pdfminer' library – you can automate that process _without_ an LLM, and have, you know, testing and repeatability and far lower computational costs. If I were receiving a PDF of that kind from some organisation I had no hope of influencing, that's what I'd do.)