[taotau]

The process you describe took me right back to my childhood days when I was fortunate to have a simple 8 bit computer running BASIC and a dialup modem. I discovered the concept of war dialing and pretty quickly found all the other modems in my local area code. I would connect to these systems and try some basic tools I knew of from having consumed the 100 or so RFCs that existed at the time (without any real software engineering knowledge - i was a 10 year old kid). I would poke and prod around each system, learning new things along the way, but essentially going in blind each time.

The only real advantage I had over the current crop of LLMs was the ability to reliably retain context between sessions, but even that wasnt very useful initially as every system was so bespoke.

I then moved on to using some level of social engineering to extend my ability to gain access to and learn about these systems.

Doing this over and over, I like to think I have developed some pretty complex understanding and abilities.

[jdiff]

To me, the killer disadvantage for LLMs seems to be the complete and total lack of feedback. You would poke and prod, and the system would respond (which, btw, sounds like a super fun experience to explore the infant net!) An LLM doesn't have that. The LLM hears only silence and doesn't know about success, failure, error, discovery.