And often incorrect! (and occasionally refuses to answer)

The scary applications are the ones where it's not so easy to check correctness...

As for things that can actually be incorrect, that has always been impossible, but we accept the human consensus to be a close enough approximation. With that, verifying 'correctness' to the degree that is possible is actually quite easy through validating it across many different LLMs trained on the human consensus. They will not all hallucinate identically. If convergence is found, then you have also found the human consensus. That doesn't prove correctness — we have never had a way to do that — but it is equivalent to how we have always dealt with establishing what we believe is correct.

Despite your insistence, I think you will find that the human consensus is that it useful. The human consensus is especially biased in this case, I will grant you that, but it seems few humans wish they were bears in the forest. Our ability to so effectively communicate in such a messy, imperfect environment is what has enabled us to be unlike all the other animals.

It might not sound like it should work on paper, but in the real world it does.

asdjklfh asdjhgflkj bveahrvjkhgv hjagsdfhj hgertjhga ads fhdfjmjhkr

Nope, that's incorrect english.

Turns out that because we've defined "words" as a thing that means a thing, now there are rules around "language" and "words". So while you're welcome to invent whatever combination of sounds you prefer to mean what you like, those sounds can be "correct" or "incorrect" as soon as other people become involved, because now you've entered into a social construct that extends beyond yourself.

So again your conclusion is technically correct, in a navel-gazing "the universe is what I perceive" sort of way, but counterproductive to use as a building block for communication.

There is no correct or incorrect here, but I will say it looks perfectly fine to me. I don't understand it. Is that what you are trying to communicate? There are many words I don't understand; even ones found in the dictionary. That is nothing new.

Here's the magic: I don't need to understand. Nobody is born with the understanding. Where communication is desired, we use other devices to express lack of understanding and keep trying to convey intent until a shared understanding is reached. I don't yet understand what that means, but assuming you are here in good faith, I eventually will as you continue to work to communicate your intent behind it.

I know computer people who spend their days writing in programming languages that never talk back struggle with this concept, but that doesn't change the reality.

this is important, i feel like a lot of people are falling in to the "stop liking what i don't like" way of thinking. Further, there's a million different ways to apply an AI helper in software development. You can adjust your workflow in whatever way works best for you. ..or leave it as is.

Much of the AI antipathy reminds me of Wikipedia in the early-mid 2000s. I remember feeling amazed with it, but also remember a lot of ranting by skeptics about how anyone could put anything on there, and therefore it was unreliable, not to be used, and doomed to fail.

20 years later and everyone understands that Wikipedia may have its shortcomings, and yet it is still the most impressive, useful advancement in human knowledge transfer in a generation.

I think LLMs as a technology are pretty cool, much like crowdsourcing is. We finally have pretty good automatic natural language processing that scales to large corpora. That's big. Also, I think the state of the software industry that is mostly driving the development, deployment, and ownership of this technology is mostly doing uninspired and shitty things with it. I have some hope that better orgs and distributed communities will accomplish some cool and maybe even monumental things with them over time, but right now the field is bleak, not because the technology isn't impressive (although somehow despite how impressive it is it's still being oversold) but because silicon valley is full of rotten institutions with broken incentives, the same ones that brought us social media and subscriptions to software. My hope for the new world a technology will bring about will never rest with corporate aristocracy, but with the more thoughtful institutions and the distributed open source communities that actually build good shit for humanity, time and time again

Garbage in, garbage out still applies.

Which is why we shouldn't be surprised when AI, trained on the collective wisdom of facebook posts and youtube comments, keeping lying to us.

> ...to find the word, or words, by which [an] idea may be most fitly and aptly expressed

Digital reverse dictionaries / thesauri like https://www.onelook.com/thesaurus/ can take natural language input, and afaict are strictly better at this task than LLMs. (I didn't know these tools existed when I wrote the rest of this comment.)

I briefly investigated LLMs for this purpose, back when I didn't know how to use a thesaurus; but I find thesauruses a lot more useful. (Actually, I'm usually too lazy to crack out a proper thesaurus, so I spend 5 seconds poking around Wiktionary first: that's usually Good Enough™ to find me an answer, when I find an answer I can trust it, and I get the answer faster than waiting for an LLM to finish generating a response.)

There's definitely room to improve upon the traditional "big book of synonyms with double-indirect pointers" thesaurus, but LLMs are an extremely crude solution that I don't think actually is an improvement.

"What's a word that means admitting a large number of uses?"

That seems hard to find in a thesaurus without either versatile or multifarious as a starting point (but those are the end points).

> Best match is versatile which usually means: Capable of many different uses

with "multi-purpose", "adaptable", "flexible" and "multi-use" as the runner-up candidates.

---

Like you, I had no idea that tools like OneLook Thesaurus existed (despite how easy it would be to make one), so here's my attempt to look this up manually.

"Admitting a large number of uses" -> manually abbreviated to "very useful" -> https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/useful -> dead end. Give up, use a thesaurus.

https://www.wordhippo.com/what-is/another-word-for/very_usef..., sense 2 "Usable in multiple ways", lists:

> useful multipurpose versatile flexible multifunction adaptable all-around all-purpose all-round multiuse multifaceted extremely useful one-size-fits-all universal protean general general-purpose […]

Taking advantage of the fact my passive vocabulary is greater than my active vocabulary: no, no, yes. (I've spuriously rejected "multipurpose" – a decent synonym of "versatile [tool]" – but that doesn't matter.) I'm pretty sure WordHippo is machine-generated from some corpus, and a lot of these words don't mean "very useful", but they're good at playing the SEO game, and I'm lazy. Once we have versatile, we can put that into an actual thesaurus: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/thesaurus/versatile. But none of those really have the same sense as "versatile" in the context I'm thinking of (except perhaps "adaptable"), so if I were writing something, I'd go with "versatile".

Total time taken: 15 seconds. And I'm confident that the answer is correct.

By the way, I'm not finding "multifarious" anywhere. It's not a word I'm familiar with, but that doesn't actually seem to be a proper synonym (according to Wiktionary, at least: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Thesaurus:heterogeneous). There are certainly contexts where you could use this word in place of "versatile" (e.g. "versatile skill-set" → "multifarious skill-set"), but I criticise WordHippo for far less dubious synonym suggestions.

M-W gives an example use of "Today’s Thermomix has become a beast of multifarious functionality. — Matthew Korfhage, Wired News, 21 Nov. 2025 "

wordhippo strikes me as having gone beyond the traditional paper thesaurus, but I can accept that things change and that we can make a much larger thesaurus than we did when we had to collect and print. thesaurus.com does not offer these results, though, as a reflection of a more traditional one, nor does the m-w thesaurus.

Importantly to the point being discussed, what you did does not work at all against an actual physical thesaurus book.

> (state of being useful): usefulness, value, advantages, benefit, return, merits, virtue, note

where "note" is a synonym of distinction, not utility, and Thesaurus:utility has fewer entries than this. Versatility should be listed in Thesaurus:utility as a related concept.

Furthermore, even if we allow "very useful", that's a far cry from "admitting a large number of uses". The latter requires a search engine to properly map.

Which they've been good at for a while. You could have googled "word meaning admitting a large number of uses" back in 2018 and gotten good answers.

My point is, the tools you've linked to are useful/versatile, but it's not the thesaurus that makes them so useful, it's the digital query engine built on top of the thesaurus.

Did you have trouble with this part?

To me it is reminiscent of liberalist history, the idea that history is a constant progression from animalistic barbarism to civilisation, and nothing but the latest thing is of any value. Instead of jumping to conclusions and showing my loathing for this particular tradition I decided to try and get more information about where they're coming from.

Is my use of a dictionary a blatant disregard for millennia of scriptural knowledge traditions? I don’t think so at all. Rather, it exemplifies how human knowledge advances: we build on the work of our predecessors and contemporaries rather than reinvent the wheel every time. LLM use is an example of this.

There was another way: Make one up.

That is what the people you read from/talked to did before relaying it to you.

That depends on your goals. If you are writing in your private journal, or a comment on HN, it doesn't matter one bit.

If you want to find commonality with other people it is significantly more efficient, but still not required. It is not like one is born understanding words. They are not passed down from the heavens. They are an invention. When I say 'sloopydoopidydoo' you might not know what I intend by it right away, but the path to figuring it out is a solved problem. Even young children can handle it.

> For existing concepts it's much better to use the words that have already been established, because other people can look them up in a dictionary.

Let's put it to the test: I added enums to the programming language I am working on. Tell me, with your dictionary in hand, what do I mean by that?

Here's the thing: According to the dictionary, an enum is something like Go's iota or C's enum. But many people will tell you that Go doesn't have enums — that an enum is what others might recognize as a tagged union. That kind of language evolution happens all the time. So, what do I mean? Am I using the dictionary definition, or the community definition that is quickly gaining favour and will no doubt be added to the dictionary as soon as someone has a chance to update it? Both uses have been widely established in my opinion. In fact, the Swift programming language's documentation even acknowledges both uses and then goes on to explain what it means by "enum" to remove any confusion.

I look forward to seeing if you captured my intent.