GPT-4.1 is a capable model, especially for structured outputs and tool calling. I’ve been using LLMs for my day to day grunt work for two years now and this is my goto as a great combination of cheap and capable.
I'm honestly really impressed with GPT-4.1 mini. It is my default from messing around by their API because it is unbelievably inexpensive and genuinely capable at most of the things I throw at it.
I'll switch to o4-mini when I'm writing code, but otherwise 4.1-mini usually does a great job.
Fun example from earlier today:
llm -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/BenjaminAster/CSS-Minecraft/refs/heads/main/main.css \
-s 'explain all the tricks used by this CSS'
The code is clearly written but entirely uncommented: https://github.com/BenjaminAster/CSS-Minecraft/blob/main/mai...
GPT-4.1 mini's explanation is genuinely excellent: https://gist.github.com/simonw/cafd612b3982e3ad463788dd50287... - it correctly identifies "This CSS uses modern CSS features at an expert level to create a 3D interactive voxel-style UI while minimizing or eliminating JavaScript" and explains a bunch of tricks I hadn't figured out.
And it used 3,813 input tokens and 1,291 output tokens - https://www.llm-prices.com/#it=3813&ot=1291&ic=0.4&oc=1.6 - that's 0.3591 cents (around a third of a cent).
Thanks for this. I am planning to cancel my ChatGPT plus subscription and use something like the llm tool with the API key. For regular interactions, how do you handle context? For example, the UI allows me to ask a question, and then a followup and the context is kind of automatically handled.
I should have RTFM https://llm.datasette.io/en/stable/usage.html#starting-an-in...
Are you aware of any user interfaces that expose some limited ChatGPT functionality using a UI, that internally uses llm. This is for my non-techie wife.
Here's one: https://github.com/icarito/gtk-llm-chat
I've been meaning to put together a web UI for ages, I think that's the next big project now that tools is out.
It's not using LLM, but right now one of the best UI options out there is https://openwebui.com/ - it works really well with Ollama (and any other OpenAI-compatible endpoint).
> while minimizing or eliminating JavaScript
How come it doesn't know for sure?
Because I only showed it the CSS! It doesn't even get the HTML, it's guessed all of that exclusively from what's in the (uncommented) CSS code.
Though it's worth noting that CSS Minecraft was first released three years ago, so there's a chance it has hints about it in the training data already. This is not a meticulous experiment.
(I've had a search around though and the most detailed explanation I could find of how that code works is the one I posted on my blog yesterday - my hunch is that it figured it out from the code alone.)
Thanks. I meant that it should understand that the css doesn't require/relates to a js