I type fairly well. Well, I type fast, but I do wear out a backspace key relatively quickly on most keyboards. That and a space bar.
AI helps me deal with my issues in a way that I really like. This post looks at a small thing that I appreciate, and it’s why I wish I had a small local model running for more software.
This is part of a series of experiments with AI systems.
Searching for Posts
Today I was searching for some posts. I typed in something and found nothing.
Clearly, I mistyped something, but before I fixed this, I alt-tab’d over to Claude and tried a similar query. It worked much, much better.
Not perfect, as the search (corrected) on my site shows more posts.
In this case, what I really wish was that this search box (and lots of other software), were running a small model, not an LLM, but a SLM, that would interpret my poor typing and do what I want. Or ask me and remember what dumb mistakes I make all the time.
If an AI were powering the search, it would guess I mean “Monday” not “moday” and just run the appropriate search, get me all the results, and help me smooth out my day. Instead, I burned a few seconds looking at this, getting my brain to decode what search thing I’d mis-typed, and broke my concentration. I was thinking of a subject and had to change context to figuring out a search typo.
Not a big interruption, but an interruption nevertheless.
I typo things all the time. Git constantly asks me if “git stauts” is really “git status”, but it doesn’t just run that. I should re-enable autocorrect, but who has the time. Maybe I’ll ask Copilot to do that.
In any case, the sloppy mistakes, the implied context, these are things humans deal with well. We can overlook typos and even understand things that don’t look like words. I bet many of you know what this says.
“According to a researche [sic] at Cambridge University, it doesn’t matter in what order the letters in a word are, the only importent [sic] thing is that the first and last letter be at the right place.” – science alert
For most of my life, computers required being more exact, which was a struggle for many people. Search, led by Google, has helped, but it isn’t as good as an LLM, nor does this help in many pieces of software.
To me, this is one place a local LLM, watching what you type and doing a much better job than phone autocorrect, in all the place I type. That’s what Copilot should do. Fix my typing in software, in the CLI, and other places. Learn what I do and help me.
Right now, Copilot is not something I like, but I see AI potential for the future if they try to make it work well, and not just stuff it in there.
FYI, #@$#$#@$ Copilot didn’t do the work for me.
