Recently, I had bizarre situation: I wanted to play a game from my childhood on Windows 11, but, without changing two booleans in the settings, I could not reliably move my in-game cursor. The catch is that to change those values in the settings, I needed to move my in-game cursor. So I was stuck.

After digging around, I found a file that looked like it could be the settings file, but it was not plaintext.

Naturally, I told Claude all the options I knew existed in the settings and told it what I needed it to change.

After about 10 minutes poking around my system and the file, it correctly identified the bits (not bytes!) that corresponded to the two settings, and flipped them on. It. Just. Worked!

(Well, then I found out I actually needed to do quite a lot more than flipping those bits, but I still found it worth sharing).

I have many more experiences similar to these. LLMs are an amazing superpower.

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txomon 18 hours ago | parent [-]

I have a similar experience. I'm playing minecraft lately and I have patched already like 5 issues in the server that I would never put together time to trace/debug/understand/fix, including some o(n^3) integration between mods that was lagging the server. Same thing for utilities, managing backups, etc.

	▲	jorl17 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I've said this time and time again but with LLMs I got the joy of being a little kid learning to code and build stuff again. I haven't had such a custom-built setup since my earliest college days, because I had lost the time to tinker and looked for stuff that just worked. Now tinkering is so much easier that I mod the software I use all the time as well. For example, I needed to change something in a particular function of firefox (which was in and of itself an amazing claude adventure to find that solved a problem I've had for well over 2 years), but only that very specific function. I didn't want to fork firefox and have to constantly rebuild it just because of this one function. So I setup an LD_PRELOAD (well, not LD_PRELOAD, but the macOS equivalent) trick that injects only my modified function, as well as a full mechanism that traps firefox's auto-update process to reinject/re-arm the LD_PRELOAD trick into newer versions. I've had it going on for 3 months without any issues. I counted and I have about 18 custom built apps ranging from "full blown swift GUI" to "tiny helper script" that have really changed how I interact with my computers for the better. It's so cool to be living this revolution.