alt Hacker News> I should invoke an LLM every time I want to read a book or do a crossword.
Well no, I'd say, use any of the existing 100 book readers to read a book, or any of 50 crossword apps.
But if you want to use an LLM to customize it the exact way you want it. Yes, use the LLM every time you want to do it. Wanting the LLM to do a previous gen app and then get out of the way sounds like asking for faster horses. Just tell the LLM you want to play a crossword game with X and Y rules, then give it a name so you can play it again in the future if you want, and if you want to try out rule Z, you do that, a la Kay's Dynabook.
That may sound weird to you, but asking an LLM to 'make software like we used to' sounds weird to me, and seeing "invoking an LLM every time I want to do X" as weird sounds like something that's true only for a very brief period of time where something is so uncommon that it's inference is expensive.
I can imagine a future where it might make sense. Right now, though, it would make for a far worse experience, and wouldn't even really be practically possible.
Both of those examples were real ones. The crossword app runs on my phone, pulls the crosswords from a specific source, and lets me access and solve them via the exact interface I prefer. The ebook app is cross platform, syncs via a remote server, has the interface I want and includes some niche features. There's no realistic way to create that on the fly every time I want to read a book on my phone, and if there were it would be extremely inefficient.
And I see literally no advantages to doing so -- even if time and tokens weren't an issue, what would I gain by recreating the apps from a prompt every time I wanted to use them, rather than deterministically running code I have already tested?