The Instrument Analogy

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Main takeaway: You gotta practice!

Before I over-extend and butcher this analogy (from Geoffrey Huntley, around ~13:20) it's worth highlighting the very useful and common sense takeaways of comparing using an LLM to learning an instrument:

1: you gotta practice!

2: through practice, you'll get better at it/more comfortable

Extending the analogy a little: If using LLMs is like playing that guitar, what does that suggest about the output?

What does an LLM output when you ask it for software? The consensus seems to be: software, but worse and faster.

I think we can do better than that.

What if we thought about LLM-output as its own thing, with its own constraints, strengths, weaknesses, and properties? Following the LLM-as-instrument analogy, we might say...

There's always plenty more where that came from

It would be silly to get particularly attached to the sounds coming from a guitar. Did you make an interesting sound? Awesome! Do it again and record it, save it to disk this time. Once it's recorded you can replay it, remix it, send it to a friend across the network. But when the sound first comes out of the guitar? Probably not worth getting attached to.

Different people will like different stuff, and this is fine

Some people don't like the sound of guitars. People really didn't like electric guitars, at first. And nobody particularly likes to hear a guitar played badly.

It would be pretty silly to get upset at someone for how they play the guitar. But it also would be pretty rude if someone said they didn't like heavy metal and you kept playing it at them.

It's nice when the output is in conversation with other sources

When the guitar is aware, subtly adjusting volume, tempo, and rhythm in dialogue with the drums and the keyboard? That's nice. That's a pretty good situation no matter what genre or style.

Extending it a liiiiiittle more: What does the Internet in 2026 sound like?

We all just got this new instrument, nobody knows how to play it yet, and as a result today, the internet looks like how a classroom of novice violin players sounds.

Everyone is playing at the same time and has to play loudly just to be heard. A few kids are absolutely delighted at the raw agency they feel from being able to make these new sounds, so they're really going for it. When the violins get put away it's still all any of the kids seem to talk about. The creative writing exercises, book reports, and word problems in math too are all just kids talking about their new violins.

Stretching it even fuuuurther: There's no best instrument, and there's no best LLM workflow

In my early twenties, with no musical background, I tried pick up an instrument. I first tried the guitar, and then the harmonica, then the piano, which I still play.

Around when I got into the piano my friend (who plays everything) said that with the guitar and harmonica, as a total beginner, I was maybe struggling because I was trying to learn two things at once. For both guitar and harmonica, I had to struggle with both the basics of music, and how to get the instrument to make consistent sounds. With the piano, by contrast, I got a perfect C every time I pressed the button key.

The piano was friendlier to me as a total novice, and so a better choice. By contrast, though, if I had been motivated by some specific goal like "I want to take a guitar to the beach with friends and play Wonderwall", I might have continued to struggle on the harder path. Nothing wrong with that! But I'm glad, for myself, that I found a gentler on-ramp into not any specific outcome but instead a lifelong relationship with music.

I want to use LLMs productively for the rest of my career. Decades, hopefully. With that in mind, I want to explore workflows that are productive enough, but also gentle on me as the human in the loop. After all, every LLM workflow/product will get you running software of dubious origin! So trying to pick the "best" one, that will deliver some specific outcome is like learning an instrument because you're attached to some specific image of who you'll be when you master it.

Reaaaaaaally stretching the analogy (oh god it's gonna snap, look out!!!): What if Anthropic and OpenAI start charging API prices tomorrow?

For the record: I do feel bad about my LLM energy usage. I am on the $100 Claude plan, and I hit my limits sometimes.

This is like if Baldwin Pianos were Diesel-powered, very expensive to play, but also heavily subsidized. I am playing the Baldwin because my curiosity about the frontier of this technology outweighs my guilt.

But if tomorrow I couldn't afford the Diesel-powered Baldwin? I would take the piano skills I learned on the awesome, insane pollution machine and use them on a more modest instrument.

So if you're a better person than me, and you still want to learn about LLMs the "worse" models are just as good to practice on. You can play scales just fine on any old piano.