One hacker’s view on LLMs

I was at Breaking Breadboards the other night. It’s a local hardware-meets-software event, which this month happened to be a show-and-tell. Many inspiring experts and projects, but I want to quickly note one talk to make sure I remember it.It was on "3D design using Claude", and the speaker, Tony Waite, has had (as I understand it) vision issues for a good chunk of his life. It didn’t stop him amassing considerable skills in a hardware engineering career, and he pointed out that now Claude, although not perfect, has reached a point where he can send its designs “down the line to China” and get back solid, quality work.That’s not the bit I want to remember. It’s this:He came across as a true Hacker in the proper, positive, sense of the word. Zero respect for The Enterprise, and focused on utility and people. When someone asked what he thought of different LLMs, and switching models, he was precise: it’s about what the tool can do for me today, ideally for free, ideally open source.…