One of my favorite takeaways from the Django Chat podcast last fall was when Adrian Holovaty, one of the original creators of Django, discussed the recent case of LLM-Inspired Development.

You can see a short clip of it here:

Basically, users of his service, SoundSlice, kept asking for a new feature because ChatGPT hallucinated that it existed. And so, eventually, Adrian and his team built it!

I just had my own version of that with my personal site. I’m giving a talk at EuroPython next month, and after creating all my slides–from scratch, by the way–I asked Claude to review them for feedback. One thing it mentioned was that the closing slide didn’t exist and it volunteered a suggestion for what it should look like.

Flight Map

Now there’s a lot that’s mediocre about this slide. But the interesting part was the suggested URL at the bottom: wsvincent.com/talks.

I have long taken the time to post my conference talks over the years on the About page, but admittedly it’s at the bottom and is probably hard to find. So, inspired by Claude, I’ve now added a Talks page that features them. And while I’m not going to use this slide to conclude my talk, I will link to the new talks page in it.

To me, this episode highlights a positive use of LLMs: generating ideas. Notice I didn’t just paste my talk prospectus into Claude and use that. Granted, I was curious and tried, and it was not anything I’d be willing to present. But if you already put in some work, maybe use Claude or another LLM for research and actively guide the process; there is real value to be had if you are otherwise doing all the work yourself.

In this case, Claude giving me boilerplate advice to just have the talks at a /talks page was just the push I needed to do the obvious thing.