My friend Matt Holden was talking about building a feature in his https://www.texipedia.com/

The feature is to allow a user to free-hand draw a symbol and then find Latex symbols that match.

The old way to do this would be an extremely complex, finely tuned system to do handwriting recognition.

The best open source implementation is some complex ball of Haskell.

The new way to do it… simply send the user's scribble to GPT-4o.

The model is cheap and good enough to… just do it.

If you have a cheap oracle service that can answer your questions quickly and accurately, simply call out to the oracle.

And if you ever want to remove your dependency, later you can factor it out into a proper, locally-implemented approach in the Old Way.

But you might never need to!