[ht_th]

Is it? It'll take a while for fertilizer and sun placement to take visually effect, and there's risk that short term effects aren't indicative of long term effects.

How can you verify the recommendations are sound, valid, safe, complete, etc., without trying them out? And trying out unsound, invalid, unsafe, incomplete, etc., recommendations might result in dead plants in a couple of weeks.

[Dilettante_]

I personally use chatgpt for initial discovery on these sorts of problems, maybe ask a probing question or two and then go back to traditional search engines to get a very rough second opinion(which might also lead to another round of questions). By the end of that process I'll either have seen that the llm is not helpful for that particular problem, or have an answer that I'm "reasonably confident" is "good enough" to use for something medium to low risk like potentially killing a plant. And I got there within 10-20 minutes, half of that being me just reading the 'bots summary.

[matwood]

> How can you verify the recommendations are sound, valid, safe, complete, etc., without trying them out?

Such an odd complaint about LLMs. Did people just blindly trust Google searches before hand?

If it's something important, you verify it the same way you did anything else. Check the sources and use more than a single query. I have found the various LLMs to very useful in these cases, especially when I'm coming at something brand new and have no idea what to even search for.

[lithocarpus]

Eh, for something like this the cost of it being wrong might be pretty small, but I'd bet odds are good that its recommendations will be better than whatever I might randomly come up with without doing any research. And I don't have the time to do the research on normal old google where it's really hard to find exactly what I want.

I've found it immensely helpful for giving real world recommendations about things like this, that I know how to find on my own but don't have the time to do all the reading and synthesizing.