Harald Revery - Things to do with LLMs

For the last eight months, I have been experimenting a lot with Large Language Models (LLMs), despite me being very hesitant to using "AI tools" for various reasons, I do find this technology very useful for certain tasks, one being to generate code, specifically HTML, JavaScript and Python (with some mixed results with Rust and C++), but here some cool projects to do while the "AI" hype is carrying most of the computational costs.

Maybe models gets better and cheaper or it will be regulated, expensive, hit the data wall or the limit of what token prediction algorithms can do hits a ceiling, leading to another "AI winter".

Anyway, instead of speculating I will focus on naming some cool projects to play around with and why I think they are worth doing. The current (available) models performances are pretty good for these types of projects.

Static Website

Make your own website, preferably a static website with as little JS and dependencies as possible to not break, easy to archive and maintain.

In the digital age, being under social media algorithms and being forced to present yourself with a very stale aesthetics feels wrong. With your own website, the only guideline you have to follow is the server providers terms of service and national law, no power tripping admin or shadow bans. With LLMs and domains being relatively cheap (in addition of getting a nice email domain), I think it's worth creating your own "corner of the Internet" for your portfolio or blog.

LaTeX templates (letters, reports, books and so on)

Maybe you use other formats for document writing, but I personally have to use LaTeX due to my career field requires heavy mathematical formulas. So far in the world of mathematics and physics there is no other way of doing it in a simpler/convenient way. Since LLMs are really good at generating LaTeX syntax, it's more pleasant to write its syntax now.

LLMs can easily make a nice template for writing reports, books, letters that looks so sleek and are not a structural mess! I think that whenever you write something, the text represents you in some way, having a default LaTeX settings or a Google Docs layout just stinks "I don't care, here is my word salad slop", just having a nice template you can grab saves you from that bad image.

Archival considerations

In contrast of having a static website that is your digital presence, I think it's also important to bring what is digital to the real world.

In the last couple of decades (well, as long I have been alive) there has been a push to store everything digitally, despite its technology being really fragile. HDDs, SSDs and CDs can barely store something reliably for 10 years, while alternatives such as LTO Tape and M-DISCs still needs fragile and expensive hardware to be used, in turn also requires its own maintenance. As humans, it's really dangerous to rely on storing information in a format that requires advanced electronics and logic to extract said information. Paper has proven to be the most durable and cost effective medium. Books are simply battle tested and has stood the test of time for storing information. Books are the only physical medium that can guarantee information being stored between two generations. Just keep it away from fire and water, it will lasts for ~50 years (provided it's acid-free paper and some quality ink to guarantee easy readability) and you only need light and reading skills to extract information from the medium.

Having a printer and some nice print ready templates to take what ever you have to a physical paper seems like a good thing to have, LLMs can help you automate this for your personal texts.

OBS Studio streaming layout

One thing that I find odd is how much we use computers, yet there is minimum efforts in how people present stuff to each other on the screen to others. Recoding and streaming is one of those ways we can show how to do something on a computer, yet only the video game sphere has pushed this field.

Making an OBS Studio layout for screen recording, having screen + camera view with easy key-binds between the basic scenes seem like nice thing to have ready to go whenever you want to just share something on the Internet.

"Vibe coded" apps

This one is making a lot noise, but personally I think making simple versions of commercial software that can run on any hardware is convenient. Even if they might contain jank, it's at least my own jank that I know how to work around. Every commercial software out there is made to synchronise to a server (spyware) and require you to have a paid subscription for certain features or even just opening up your files (let's be real here, it's ransomware at this point). A simple app that just changes a files content without enforced Internet connection, ads, and payments is how computers are supposed to work. LLMs can finally make computers usable again.

Here are some of the apps I have made:

Simple markdown, latex or just .docx editor, so you don't have to rely on expensive, ugly and bloat software just to edit a spreadsheet or a text/document file.
Media converter app / script, have your favorite settings as default and just run.
Screen savers / wall paper loops: If you got a logo or something for a brand, make some self contained webpages with interesting visuals. See it as a sibling project to the OBS Studio streaming layout or if you have a branding project and you need some background visuals (TV billboards or background in a video and so on).

In the end of the day, you have to make the choice between trusting a group of strangers code or some LLM generated code (that was trained on these strangers work...). Judging at the state of modern software, I'm willing to trust the "AI slop" now. Just keep a bunch of backups of your work and don't "YOLO code" or "one shot prompt" too many features, make the apps import/export files rather than opening and editing them, then it should mostly be fine.

Mini game

This is more to just to get to know "how the sausage gets made" kind of a project. Games are one of those fields where the quality has dropped down really bad in the digital realm. To know how truly bad the average indie game developer is, prompt the LLM to make a game. Push the tech and see how far it can go. It's really amazing how far these models can go, provided some smart folder structure, framework and instructions. This should give an insight how bad game developers are in general and how they don't deserve your money.

To be clear: Yes, I'm stating that "AI slop" is better than your average indie game. It's way more fun to burn that €20 on LLM tokens / a subscription to create my own AI slop than to waste the same amount of money on someone elses indie slop, that I wouldn't even download if it was free.

I hope this can spark the motivation to do some nice projects while this AI craze lasts.