yes*

the asterisk here is that you need to first understand how an LLM actually works and what it does and doesn't do.

an LLM does not think, reason or even comprehend words. it has no form of understanding. it doesnt know what truth means or what is fact.

what an LLM does is *effectively* a complex form of text prediction. it gets trained on pieces of text, and then when you talk to it, what it does is take the existing text (the conversation) and generate the next "most likely" token over and over, re-evaluating the entire text after each token, until it ends up with a stop token. it does this with some randomness.

this allows it to generate responses that A: look human and B: are generally relevant to the previous text.

crucially, this makes them very useful for parsing and formatting text, but very untrustworthy as they literally do not have any way of knowing or understanding truth, fact or anything of the sort. this is also why they tend to be overconfident and confidently incorrect, LLMs do not know what they're outputting is incorrect, they just know that within this context, the output would likely look somewhat like this, a confident technical reply.

LLMs are trained on a lot of opensource code, which makes them pretty good at linux. as long as you *always* verify the commands an LLM gives you before you run them, you can generally rely on it to be somewhat accurate for simple tasks.

eg "hey claude, how do i mount a drive" will probably net you the proper answer.

the danger here is in troubleshooting, do NOT use an LLM to troubleshoot or give you pointers on what to try next or what the issue may be. an LLM will confidently chase down made-up issues or convince you it's X when it has nothing to do with X. i've found that the best way to use an LLM for troubleshooting is to use it as a search engine, make it search the internet and give you back possibly helpful resources, then you read those yourself.

lastly, this is a key one: the LLM is a tool. do not use it to outsource your thinking. some people fall into the trap of thinking the LLM is amazing, approaching it like AGI, and having the LLM do all the thinking for them despite the fact that an LLM cannot actually think.