I have tried, unsuccessfully, to get various AI models to create a script that will curl or wget the latest Ubuntu LTS desktop torrent, even should that LTS version update in the future (beyond 24.01.1 LTS). The purpose is that I would like to seed whatever the latest LTS torrent is and I don’t want to have to keep checking the Ubuntu page for updates, I want it automatic. I know that LTS is slow to change versions but I am annoyed that AI can’t just write a decent script for this.
I also have downloaded rtorrent as a command line and will deal with how to make sure the latest LTS is used, as opposed to the prior one, with a different script later, but that’s not what I’m trying to now.
I am not asking for a human to create this script for me. I am asking why AI models keep getting this so wrong. I’ve tried ChatGPT 4o, I’ve tried DeepSeek, I’ve tried other localized models, Reasoning Models. They all fail. And when I execute their code, and I get errors and show it to the models, they still fail, many times in a row. I want to ask Lemmy if getting an answer is theoretically possible with the right prompt or if AI just sucks at coding.
This shouldn’t be too hard to do. At https://www.releases.ubuntu.com/, they list the releases. When curling the webpage, there’s a list of the releases with version numbers some with LTS. New versions are always larger numbers. At https://ubuntu.com/download/alternative-downloads, they list the torrents. Also, all release torrents for desktop are in the format https://www.releases.ubuntu.com/XX.XX/*desktop*.torrent. I’ve tried to teach these models this shit and to just create a script for me, holy shit it’s been annoying. The models are incredibly stupid with scripting.
I’m not a computer programmer or developer and am picking up more coding here and there just because I want to do certain things in linux. But I just don’t understand why this is so difficult.
So my question is, is there ANY prompt for ANY model that will output successful code for this seemingly easy task, or is AI still too stupid to do this?
Why the hell would you ask an AI model to write the script for you? It’s a one-liner, took me just a minute to write. Even if you know very little of Bash I can’t imagine it would take more than a few minutes of research to figure it out.
curl $(curl https://ubuntu.com/download/alternative-downloads | grep -o "https.*desktop.*torrent" | tail -1) -o ubuntu-latest.torrentAI is mediocre at best when it comes to writing code, and if you don’t have the skill to troubleshoot its garbage outputs you shouldn’t be using it at all.
Why the hell would you ask an AI model to write the script for you?
I mean, I think that that’s not a hard question to answer. If AI can do something, then anyone who can use human language can also do it.
AI is mediocre at best when it comes to writing code,
That’s true as of 2025, and a solid issue. I don’t think that a purely-LLM based solution is going to be the final solution.
I do think that AI will ultimately get there, though.
Great solution (esp the corrected one further down). I can relate to OP in the sense that if I studied programming, I might be able to whip something like this up, but so far I haven’t been disciplined enough to learn and practice programming consistently.
It’s also interesting, this new AI variation of Cunningham’s Law, wherein posting an incorrect solution on a discussion board will yield way more attention and correct answers than asking a question. It’s interesting to wonder why that is.
Thank you! There are two different kinds of people in the world. There are those great at coding and those great at watching netflix and doing whip-its.
edit: actually this torrent downloads ubuntu-22.04.5-desktop-amd64.iso, which isn’t the latest LTS version (which is 24.01.1). It’s probably good enough, but part of the challenge in this was to always torrent the latest one.
does anyone know why ubuntu-latest.torrent would try to download 22 instead of 24 LTS?
My bad, that’s what happens when you write a script in a minute. It turns out the latest LTS version is actually the second one listed, not the last. This one should actually fetch the latest version:
curl $(curl https://ubuntu.com/download/alternative-downloads | grep -o "https.*desktop.*torrent" | sed "2q;d") -o ubuntu-latest.torrentHooray!
look everyone, i figured it out using various methods, i’m a programmer now
I’m so confused. Why are you using sed and grep? Can’t you use sed and/or awk to write a regular expression?
I’m not the author, but I regularly use grep and sed in conjunction for things that sed or awk can theoretically do alone via multiple commands. I think that that’s pretty common – grep is used as the search tool, sed as the replacement tool, and you stick 'em together at the shell level. Memory usage isn’t very significant for something like this.
does anyone know why ubuntu-latest.torrent would try to download 22 instead of 24 LTS?
ubuntu-latest.torrent (what’s written after -o) is the output name. You should be very careful with executing commands that you don’t fully understand. Might save you a lot of trouble in the future.
You can be good at anything if you just put in some effort. The mindset that since you’re not good at programming you can never be is stupid.
This isn’t really true. We all have different characteristics. Some people are naturally more suited to certain things more than others. Yes, everyone can improve a given skill to some degree, but not everyone can be “good at” some particular thing. It’s OK, because they can be good at something else!
I don’t know if that’s actually true. If I’m 5’2" and uncoordinated will I ever become a professional basketball player? I try to be honest with myself about my strengths and weaknesses. For me, just stopping windows was the victory.
I actually agree with this attitude - do what you’re good at and not what you’re bad at - but it isn’t very popular in America where “everybody can make it”. I guess it has something to do with an Eastern/Western divide in mindset, where the eastern mindset is more “know where your place/position in society is and stick with it”.
S4:e6: “Bender Should Not Be Allowed on TV”
Wrong sublemmy, but i love the enthusiasm lol.
Isn’t this something you use rss for?
Most ppl in this section are corny af, not everyone has the aptitude to write something… 🤦♂️
Dude just stitch stack overflow answers together like the rest of us
i dont go there anymore after what they did to luigi. i’ll take ignorance over evil any day.
what’d they do
https://substack.evancarroll.com/p/the-erasure-of-luigi-mangione
even if you disagree with what he did, luigi is someone who was in horrible emotional pain due to an injury and was once someone who did code and contributed to the site. big tech erasing people from history because they can is disgusting and should be called out for what it is. luigi was not always injured, in horrible pain, and accused of a serious crime. just making it seem like he didn’t exist is pure sleaze and kowtowing to the elite corporate interests that absolutely hate how certain segments of society like him. it’s a great example of why big tech controlled by oligopolies and concentrated power is a horrible way for the public to interact with the internet. whether or not you support or condemn what he did, erasing people (albeit through “private” oligopolies) is similar to what the worst government censors did in very hash regimes.
Think there’s much better hills to die on. But you do you.
this is the hill
But you’ll use AIs? I don’t think they are much better
Just write it yourself 🤦♂️
Probably a stupid comment, but still: if you’re a coder, you might be quicker just writing such a script yourself. Just fetch the links, slice them up, sort them by version and wget the one with the highest number.
If you’re not a coder, maybe someone here can help out?
Yeah, once you start getting good at something, it’s often faster to just do it yourself. That’s how you know you’re good at something.
AI isn’t stupid because it doesn’t possess any intelligence to begin with, the term “AI” is just a marketing misnomer.
Language Models are essentially really advanced Markov Chain generators. Once you understand that, you’ll realize why your question is like “I keep asking these water mills to make me a cup of coffee, but they all taste like dirt”: wrong tool for the job, it just happens to be tangentially related.
You’re also asking if there’s a way to precisely word a request so that the computer will do what you want it to do. Luckily for you, there is! It’s a trick that’s been around for ~60 years and it’s called “programming languages”
Yes, but I need an interface between my brain at my IQ level and the programming language to get it to work… which apparently why I need to use a bunch of non-sense generating Markov chains…
That interface is called a manual or tutorial, and there are many better ones than neural networks
when i first started linuxing linux, i tried to read man man, but it was over 700 lines
my primary linux skills are whip-its and watching netflix. i’m sort of at the lower-skill end of the linux userbase. i don’t know if there’s any way to every change that, so why try?
So, I kinda had this problem myself at one point a decade and a half ago, only it was booze and serviio.
I ended up taking an old tower I had, installing Ubuntu on it with no Xwindows or GUI of any kind, set up ssh, and unplugged the monitor, keyboard, and mouse and accessed the Ubuntu box only from a putty session on my windows box.
Then, when I wanted to do anything on the Linux box I’d ssh in and command line it. And Google and try again until I got it right.
I turned it into a domain controller for the windows boxes (well, login server via ldap) and had an irc bouncer and a bot on it, among other things.
All while still drinking and streaming video.
I can’t say what the magic bullet will be for anyone else, but I was able to learn by removing my “crutches” until it just… Clicked for me. YMMV but don’t stop trying.
It took me more time to read this thread than it did for me to learn the basics of Bash scripting.
Do like we did back in the day, RTFM
man bash is over 64,000 lines. we may also have different IQs, mine more suitable to asking profound philosophical questions to DeepSeek R1 (see https://lemmy.world/post/24838347 for example) and yours more suitable to learning bash scripting through electro-osmosis
for everyone downvoting me, i have tried to get better at linux! don’t think of me as a lazy linux user, think of me as among the best windows users who switched to linux
You’re basically asking Clippy how to use Microsoft Excel to create a Microsoft Word document.
Someone is telling you that Microsoft Word is the tool you are looking for and you are saying “but I don’t want to decompile word to learn how it works”.
As a user of Microsoft Windows 11 by no choice of my own, can I ask how you qualified to be the best of the windows users?
i missy clippy
it was the only good thing to ever come out of windows
You don’t have to learn every command all at once, just hone in on the basic things you need to start with.
Besides, Bash scripting is basically just taking the commands you’d manually type into the terminal and putting them together into a script file.
So, learn just enough terminal commands to manually accomplish your goal first, then copy/paste those commands into a text file, and you’re already ¾ of the way there.
https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/shell-scripting-crash-course-how-to-write-bash-scripts-in-linux/
The AI will provide methods you could try, but ultimately a human will need to review and edit the code.
So there’s a 0 chance of it creating a working script with just AI? I probably am not knowledgeable enough at coding to do bash script corrections myself. If I have to become a good enough coder to edit code, it sort of defeats the purpose of AI doing the code for me. Why not just learn bash scripting and do it myself at that point?
In my experience, Chat GPT is much better at the general programming patterns and concepts than specific API implementations. Especially less commonly used ones, where it often gives a solution that only looks reasonable but uses the totally wrong methods. I guess it’s similar with scraping the HTML of the Ubuntu releases page to get the latest torrent. It doesn’t know the exact HTML layout, so it guesses what is a likely one, even though it is wrong.
AI models are great for troubleshooting and understanding concepts or figuring out approaches but in actual implementation they seem weak to me. I’ve heard people saying how AI is replacing much of coding and I’m not really a coder but I can’t understand how that would be currently possible with the responses I see from AI,
AI certainly can do it. But here’s the thing with generative AI: the answer is only as good as the question you ask. If you don’t know exactly what to ask for and which details are important, the AI doesn’t know what you meant to ask and can’t infer that. AI usually does not pick up implied context that an experienced person would. A person would be able to make an educated guess about what you actually meant and answer that question.
As someone with 20 years of programming experience, I would recommend against using AI to learn to program. You’re asking something that doesn’t actually know how to program to show you how to do it. From my experience with coworkers using AI, it doesn’t improve their work; it simply accelerates the rate at which they can produce low quality work.
Once you’re more skilled than the AI, you can use it to speed up menial tasks, like generating boilerplate and stubbing things out. It absolutely will be wrong in some ways, and you need to be able to tell when it’s wrong and know how to fix it.
You’re probably right, but I’m not actually trying to learn to program. I learn programming and linux on an as needed basis, but I just keep learning more of it when I want to do stuff.
If I can’t get AI to figure this out for me, I am not sure if it’s worth it to me to learn substantially more about bash programming just to bypass going to a webpage. It would probably be like 4 days of learning. From the page listing the torrents in a spreadsheet, I am guessing it would be easy to figure out how to list them, delete the ones without LTS in the name, order them by number and delete everything but the highest number. An LLM could probably help me with that task. I still don’t know if I have the IQ/insight amount to get it to a working level, so it’s also a gamble.
It just seems like an LLM should be able to do all of this. This is sort of the quintessential trivial programming task that an LLM should be able to easily do.
So the thing is, if you learn enough about bash to bypass going to this webpage, it’ll also help you bypass going to other webpages. What you learn now will help you in the future.
i don’t know if i’m capable of longitudinal thinking like that. my style is more like why not have some delicious and nutritious candy and then sleep for 8 hours?
Early in I was really interested in what I could get chat got to do with minimal guidance. It really didn’t (at the time) have the ability to hold any kind of overarching “structure” or goal in mind. When it got something wrong, it would just wrongly keep trying the same thing.
I’m still interested in what a local AI buddy could do on its own, but in terms actually ever accomplishing anything, I think it still very much needs its hands held.
