Back in the nineties, I was interviewing someone and he mentioned the idea of joke templates. I can’t remember his example, but when I told my boss, he said, “Oh yeah, I love the one where someone says a number and then you multiply it by seven and say it’s that many in dog years.”

My favorite joke template is the two problems one. I think it was originally: “You have a problem and you think, ‘I know: I’ll use a regular expression’ — now you have two problems.”

I’m a sucker for any variant on this. I just posted this to LinkedIn:

You have a problem with your AI code generator undoing its own work when you add something new, so … “I know,“ you think, “I’ll add another LLM to check the code of the first one.“ Now you have two problems.

RegExes aren’t AI, but it felt that way sometimes since they are so good at what they are good at. But, just like LLMs, they suck at what they suck at. Generally, they are great at finding answers that have objective, verifiable truth. But, they are not good at knowing a secret fact. The key is to provide the facts and ability to verify, and then let the LLM iterate to the solution.