Man using AI is death from a thousand cuts.
No single thing is unreasonable, but put together they make you less productive just trying it.
I spent an hour today trying to get Gemni, Claude, ChatGPT to accept two very small excel files 55k and combine them, add a column indicating the origin of the data or both if they both existed and then output to something I could save. No dice.
All of them had these problems. What it did do, is say it couldn’t understand a very simple one sheet file with 80 lines, and another excel sheet file with 540 lines. It said it couldn’t output to a file. Or it said that it couldn’t finish because it had a length limit and that was it. Claude told me that, and the month that I had paid was still active!! I tried pasting the text, but that was even worse. Pasted text is even more problematic for them than text in files.
This is not to complain but rather to state that at each stage I thought I was getting somewhere but wasn’t. When I tried to simplify the job into simple steps by starting with just combining the files, that didn’t work either. Come on! We have been able to combine files since Unix with cat. You can’t tell me that a trillion dollar company can’t combine two files? Apparently not.
Each different tactic I took to solve this problem caused a different problem. When I got it to understand the pasted text, then it couldn’t output a file and couldn’t tell me why other than it was too complicated. It is too complicated to combine files? Oh yeah, we aren’t in danger of Skynet being a genius.
After an hour I gave up. If I can’t make it work using three AI’s, then clearly I have to do it the manual way. I did and completed it in twenty minutes. I wonder how long we will accept that for the average person AI is a waste of time and resources.