6 ms·

> the kind you might as well copy&paste from stackoverflow This bothers me. I completely understand the conversational aspect - "what approach might work for t

> the kind you might as well copy&paste from stackoverflow This bothers me. I completely understand the conversational aspect - "what approach might work for this?", "how could we reduce the crud in this function?" - it worked a lot for me last year when I tried learning C. But the vast majority of AI use that I see is...not that. It's just glorified, very expensive search. We are willing to burn far, far more fuel than necessary because we've decided we can't be bothered with traditional search. A lot of enterprise software is poorly cobbled together using stackoverflow gathered code as it is. It's part of the reason why MS Teams makes your laptop run so hot. We've decided that power-inefficient software is the best approach. Now we want to amplify that effect by burning more fuel to get the same answers, but from an LLM. It's frustrating. It should be snowing where I am now, but it's not. Because we want to frivolously chase false convenience and burn gallons and gallons of fuel to do it. LLM usage is a part of that.

chongli 2y ago
we've decided we can't be bothered with traditional search Traditional search (at least on the web) is dying. The entire edifice is drowning under a rapidly rising tide of spam and scam sites. No one, including Google, knows what to do about it so we're punting on the whole project and hoping AI will swoop in like deus ex machina and save the day.
- romwell 2y ago
  Narrator: it did not, in fact, save the day.
- petre 2y ago
  AI will generate even more spam and scam sites more trivially.
  - ses1984 2y ago
    What do you mean “will”, we are a few years past that point.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  But it can't save the day. The problem with Google search is that it indexes all the web, and there's (as you say) a rising tide of scam and spam sites. The problem with AI is that it scoops up all the web as training data, and there's a rising tide of scam and spam sites.
- lokar 2y ago
  It took the scam/spam sites a few years to catch up to Google search. Just wait a bit, equilibrium will return.
- akoboldfrying 2y ago
  >The entire edifice is drowning under a rapidly rising tide of spam and scam sites. You make this claim with such confidence, but what is it based on? There have always been hordes of spam and scam websites. Can you point to anything that actually indicates that the ratio is now getting worse?
  - chongli 2y ago
    There have always been hordes of spam and scam websites. Can you point to anything that actually indicates that the ratio is now getting worse? No, there haven't always been hordes of spam and scam websites. I remember the web of the 90s. When Google first arrived on the scene every site on the results page was a real site, not a spam/scam site.
    - ShroudedNight 2y ago
      That was PageRank flexing its capability. There were lots of sites with reams of honeypot text that caught the other search engines.
- masfuerte 2y ago
  Google results are not polluted with spam because Google doesn't know how to deal with it. Google results are polluted with spam because it is more profitable for Google. This is a conscious decision they made five years ago.
  - chongli 2y ago
    because it is more profitable for Google Then why are DuckDuckGo results also (arguably even more so) polluted with spam/scam sites? I doubt DDG is making any profit from those sites since Google essentially owns the display ad business.
    - JohnDone 2y ago
      Ddg is actually Bing. Search as a service.
      - djvuvtgcuehb 2y ago
        And Bing is google.
  - redwall_hp 2y ago
    If you own the largest ad network that spam sites use and own the traffic firehose, pointing the hose at the spam sites and ensuring people spend more time clicking multiple results that point to ad-filled sites will make you more money. Google not only has multiple monopolies, but a cut and dry perverse incentive to produce lower quality results to make the whole session longer instead of short and effective.
- photonthug 2y ago
  Maybe it is naive but I think search would probably work again if they could roll back code to 10 or 15 years ago and just make search engines look for text in webpages. Google wasn’t crushed by spam, they decided to stop doing text search and build search bubbles that are user specific, location-specific, decided to surface pages that mention search terms in metadata instead of in text users might read, etc. Oh yeah, and about a decade before LLMs were actually usable, they started to sabotage simple substring searches and kind of force this more conversational interface. That’s when simple search terms stopped working very well, and you had to instead ask yourself “hmm how would a very old person or a small child phrase this question for a magic oracle” This is how we get stuff like: Did you mean “when did Shakespeare die near my location”? If anyone at google cared more about quality than printing money, that thirsty gambit would at least be at the bottom of the page instead of the top.
  - layer8 2y ago
    > just make search engines look for text in webpages. Google’s verbatim search option roughly does that for me (plus an ad blocker that removes ads from the results page). I have it activated by default as a search shortcut. (To activate it, one can add “tbs=li:1” as a query parameter to the Google search URL.)
    - alex1138 2y ago
      To me the stupidest thing was the removal of things like + and -. You can say it's because of Google+ but annoyingly duckduckgo also doesn't seem to honor it. Kagi seems to and I hope they don't follow the others down the road of stupid
    - tru3_power 2y ago
      Wow what? Thanks!
    - jcgrillo 2y ago
      > ?tbs=li:1 Thank you, this is almost life-alteringly good to know.
- skissane 2y ago
  I personally think a big problem with search is major search engines try to be all things to all people and hence suffer as a result. For example: a beginner developer is possibly better served by some SEO-heavy tutorial blog post; an experienced developer would prefer results weighted towards the official docs, the project’s bug tracker and mailing list, etc. But since less technical and non-technical people vastly outnumber highly technical people, Google and Bing end up focusing on the needs of the former, at the cost of making search worse for the later. One positive about AI: if an AI is doing the search, it likely wants the more advanced material not the more beginner-focused one. It can take more advanced material and simplify it for the benefit of less experienced users. It is (I suspect) less likely to make mistakes if you ask it to simplify the more advanced material than if you just gave it more beginner-oriented material instead. So if AI starts to replace humans as the main clients of search, that may reverse some of the pressure to “dumb it down”.
  - photonthug 2y ago
    > But since less technical and non-technical people vastly outnumber highly technical people, Google and Bing end up focusing on the needs of the former, at the cost of making search worse for the later. I mostly agree with your interesting comment, and I think your analysis basically jives with my sibling comment. But one thing I take issue with is the idea that this type of thing is a good faith effort, because it’s more like a convenient excuse. Explaining substring search or even include/exclude ops to children and grandparents is actually easy. Setting preferences for tutorials vs API docs would also be easy. But companies don’t really want user-directed behavior as much as they want to herd users to preferred content with algorithms, then convince the user it was their idea or at least the result of relatively static ranking processes. The push towards more fuzzy semantic search and “related content” everywhere is not to cater to novice users but to blur the line between paid advertisement and organic user-directed discovery. No need to give megacorp the benefit of the doubt on stuff like this, or make the underlying problems seem harder than they are. All platforms land in this place by convergent evolution wherein the driving forces are money and influence, not insurmountable technical difficulties or good intentions for usability.
  - consp 2y ago
- cyanydeez 2y ago
  If only google was trying to solve search rather than shareholdet values.
- skydhash 2y ago
  > Traditional search (at least on the web) is dying. That's not my experience at all. While there are scammy sites, using the search engines as an index instead of an oracle still yields useful results. It only requires to learn the keywords which you can do by reading the relevant materials .
  - chongli 2y ago
    How do you read the relevant materials if you haven’t found them yet? It’s a chicken and egg problem. If your goal is to become an expert in a subject but you’re currently a novice, search can’t help you if it’s only giving you terrible results until you “crack the code.”
- ponector 2y ago
  >> No one, including Google, knows what to do about it I'm sure they can. But they have no incentive. Try to Google an item, and it will show you a perfect match of sponsored ads and some other not-so-relevant non-sponsored results
- AtlasBarfed 2y ago
  There's no way the search AI will beat out the spamgen AI. Tailoring/retraining the main search AI will be so much more expensive that retraining the spam special purpose AIs.
- quickthrowman 2y ago
  Google could fix the problem if they wanted to, but it’s not in their interests to fix it since the spam sites generally buy ads from Google and/or display Google ads on their spam websites. Google wants to maximize their income, so..
- layer8 2y ago
  Without a usable web search index, AI will be in trouble eventually as well. There is no substitute for it.
- rubyfan 2y ago
  AI will make the problem of low quality, fake, fraudulent and arbitrage content way worse. I highly doubt it will improve searching for quality content at all.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- fmos 2y ago
  Kagi has fixed traditional search for me.
hawski 2y ago
A human can't be trusted to not make memory safety bugs. At the same time we can trust AI with logic bugs.
- kelnos 2y ago
  Since LLMs are just based on human output, we should trust LLMs (at best) as much as we trust the average human coder. And in reality we should probably trust them less.
worik 2y ago
> But the vast majority of AI use that I see is...not that. It's just glorified, very expensive search. Since the collapse of Internet search (rose tinted hindsight - was it ever any good?) I have been using a LLM as my syntax advisor. I pay for my own tokens, and I can say it is astonishingly cheap It is also very good.
jcgrillo 2y ago
What I can't wrap my head around is that making good, efficient software doesn't (by and large) take significantly longer than making bloated, inefficient enterprise spaghetti. The problem is finding people to do it with who care enough to think rigorously about what they're going to do before they start doing it. There's this bizarre misconception popular among bigtech managers that there's some tunable tradeoff between quality and development speed. But it doesn't actually work that way at all. I can't even count anymore how many times I've had to explain how taking this or that locally optimal shortcut will make it take longer overall to complete the project. In other words, it's a skill issue. LLMs can only make this worse. Hiring unskilled programmers and giving them a machine for generating garbage isn't the way. Instead, train them, and reject low quality work.
- sethammons 2y ago
  "Slow is smooth and smooth is fast"
  - jcgrillo 2y ago
    It's true every single time.
- giantg2 2y ago
  "What I can't wrap my head around is that making good, efficient software doesn't (by and large) take significantly longer than making bloated, inefficient enterprise spaghetti." In my opinion the reason we get enterprise spaghetti is largely due to requirement issues and scope creep. It's nearly impossible to create a streamlined system without knowing what it should look like. And once the system gets to a certain size, it's impossible to get business buy-in to rearchitect or refactor to the degree that is necessary. Plus the full requirements are usually poorly documented and long forgotten by that time.
  - jcgrillo 2y ago
    When scopes creep and requirements change, simply refactor. Where is it written in The Law that you have to accrue technical debt? EDIT: I'm gonna double down on this one. The fact that your organization thinks they can demand of you that you can magically weathervane your codebase to their changeable whims is evidence that you have failed to realistically communicate to them what is actually possible to do well. The fact that they think it's a move you can make to creep the scope, or change the requirements, is the problem. Every time that happens it should be studied within the organization as a major, costly failure--like an outage or similar. > it's impossible to get business buy-in to rearchitect or refactor to the degree that is necessary That's a choice. There are some other options: - Simply don't get business buy-in. Do without. Form a terrorist cell within your organization. You'll likely outpace them. Or you'll get fired, which means you'll get severance, unemployment, a vacation, and the opportunity to apply to a job at a better company. - Fight viciously for engineering independence. You business people can do the businessing, but us engineers are going to do the engineering. We'll tell you how we'll do it, not the other way. - Build companies around a culture of doing good, consistent work instead of taking expedient shortcuts. They're rare, but they exist!
Dalewyn 2y ago
>We are willing to burn far, far more fuel than necessary because we've decided we can't be bothered with traditional search. That's because traditional search fucking sucks balls.
jihadjihad 2y ago
Another frustration I have with these models is that it is yet another crutch and excuse for turning off your brain. I was tagged on a PR a couple days ago where a coworker had added a GIN index to a column in Postgres, courtesy of GPT-4o, of course. He couldn't pronounce the name of the extension, apparently not noticing that trgm == trigram, or what that might even be. Copying the output from the LLM and pasting it into a PR didn't result in anything other than him checking off a box, moving a ticket in Jira, and then onto the next thing--not even a pretense of being curious about what any of it all meant. But look at those query times now! It's been possible for a while to shut off your brain as a programmer and blindly copy-paste from StackOverflow etc., but the level of enablement that LLMs afford is staggering.
- tru3_power 2y ago
  Out of curiosity- did it work though?
GaggiX 2y ago
These models are simply much more powerful than a tradition search engine and stackoverflow, so many people use these models for a reason, a friend of mine that never tried ChatGPT until very recently managed to solve a problem he couldn't find a solution on stackoverflow using GPT-4o, next time he's probably going to ask the model directly.
- toasteros 2y ago
  I don't know what your friend's prompts were, but this probably speaks to the conversational aspect. I've found success in using LLMs to "search" for things I don't know how to search for - a 'tip of my tongue' type scenario. "How do I do a for loop" though is a waste of time and energy and should be put into a search engine. There is no need to use the inefficient power needs of an LLM to answer that question. The search engine will have cached the results of that question, leading to a much faster discovery of the answer, and less power draw to do it, whereas an LLM needs to ponder your question EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. A huge waste. Stop using LLMs for simple things.
braiamp 2y ago
> because we've decided we can't be bothered with traditional search Traditional search was only Google, and Google figured out that they don't need to improve their tools to make it better, because everyone will continue to use it as a force of habit (google is a verb!). Traditional search is being abandoned because traditional search isn't good enough for the kinds of search we need (also, while google may claim their search is very useful, people rarely search stuff nowadays, instead prefer being passively fed content via recommendations algorithm (that also use AI!))
- dleeftink 2y ago
  Algolia, Marginalia, Kagi, Scopus, ConnectedPapers, Lense[0] all stick to more or less traditional search and yield consistent high quality results. It shouldn't be one or the other, and I think the first one to combine both paradigms in a seamless fashion would be quite successfull (it has been tried, I know, but it's still a niche in many cases). [0]: https://www.lens.org/lens/search/ https://www.lens.org/lens/search/
gonzobonzo 2y ago
Doesn't this get to one of the fundamental issues though, that many of these frameworks and languages are poorly constructed in the first place? A lot of the times people turn to web searches, Stack Overflow, or AI is because they want to do X, and there's no quick, clear, and intuitive way to do X. I write cheat sheets for opaque parts of various frameworks myself. A lot of them aren't fundamentally difficult once you understand them, but they're constructed in an extremely convoluted way, and there's usually extremely poor documentation explaining how to actually use them. In fact, I'd say I use AI more for documentation than I do for code itself, because AI generated documentation is often superior to official documentation. In the end, these things shouldn't be necessary (or barely necessary) if we had well constructed languages, frameworks, libraries and documentation, but it appears like it's easier to build AI than to make things non-convoluted in the first place.

chongli 2y ago

we've decided we can't be bothered with traditional search Traditional search (at least on the web) is dying. The entire edifice is drowning under a rapidly rising tide of spam and scam sites. No one, including Google, knows what to do about it so we're punting on the whole project and hoping AI will swoop in like deus ex machina and save the day.

romwell 2y ago
Narrator: it did not, in fact, save the day.
petre 2y ago
AI will generate even more spam and scam sites more trivially.
- ses1984 2y ago
  What do you mean “will”, we are a few years past that point.
AnimalMuppet 2y ago
But it can't save the day. The problem with Google search is that it indexes all the web, and there's (as you say) a rising tide of scam and spam sites. The problem with AI is that it scoops up all the web as training data, and there's a rising tide of scam and spam sites.
lokar 2y ago
It took the scam/spam sites a few years to catch up to Google search. Just wait a bit, equilibrium will return.
akoboldfrying 2y ago
>The entire edifice is drowning under a rapidly rising tide of spam and scam sites. You make this claim with such confidence, but what is it based on? There have always been hordes of spam and scam websites. Can you point to anything that actually indicates that the ratio is now getting worse?
- chongli 2y ago
  There have always been hordes of spam and scam websites. Can you point to anything that actually indicates that the ratio is now getting worse? No, there haven't always been hordes of spam and scam websites. I remember the web of the 90s. When Google first arrived on the scene every site on the results page was a real site, not a spam/scam site.
  - ShroudedNight 2y ago
    That was PageRank flexing its capability. There were lots of sites with reams of honeypot text that caught the other search engines.
masfuerte 2y ago
Google results are not polluted with spam because Google doesn't know how to deal with it. Google results are polluted with spam because it is more profitable for Google. This is a conscious decision they made five years ago.
- chongli 2y ago
  because it is more profitable for Google Then why are DuckDuckGo results also (arguably even more so) polluted with spam/scam sites? I doubt DDG is making any profit from those sites since Google essentially owns the display ad business.
  - JohnDone 2y ago
    Ddg is actually Bing. Search as a service.
    - djvuvtgcuehb 2y ago
      And Bing is google.
- redwall_hp 2y ago
  If you own the largest ad network that spam sites use and own the traffic firehose, pointing the hose at the spam sites and ensuring people spend more time clicking multiple results that point to ad-filled sites will make you more money. Google not only has multiple monopolies, but a cut and dry perverse incentive to produce lower quality results to make the whole session longer instead of short and effective.
photonthug 2y ago
Maybe it is naive but I think search would probably work again if they could roll back code to 10 or 15 years ago and just make search engines look for text in webpages. Google wasn’t crushed by spam, they decided to stop doing text search and build search bubbles that are user specific, location-specific, decided to surface pages that mention search terms in metadata instead of in text users might read, etc. Oh yeah, and about a decade before LLMs were actually usable, they started to sabotage simple substring searches and kind of force this more conversational interface. That’s when simple search terms stopped working very well, and you had to instead ask yourself “hmm how would a very old person or a small child phrase this question for a magic oracle” This is how we get stuff like: Did you mean “when did Shakespeare die near my location”? If anyone at google cared more about quality than printing money, that thirsty gambit would at least be at the bottom of the page instead of the top.
- layer8 2y ago
  > just make search engines look for text in webpages. Google’s verbatim search option roughly does that for me (plus an ad blocker that removes ads from the results page). I have it activated by default as a search shortcut. (To activate it, one can add “tbs=li:1” as a query parameter to the Google search URL.)
  - alex1138 2y ago
    To me the stupidest thing was the removal of things like + and -. You can say it's because of Google+ but annoyingly duckduckgo also doesn't seem to honor it. Kagi seems to and I hope they don't follow the others down the road of stupid
  - tru3_power 2y ago
    Wow what? Thanks!
  - jcgrillo 2y ago
    > ?tbs=li:1 Thank you, this is almost life-alteringly good to know.
skissane 2y ago
I personally think a big problem with search is major search engines try to be all things to all people and hence suffer as a result. For example: a beginner developer is possibly better served by some SEO-heavy tutorial blog post; an experienced developer would prefer results weighted towards the official docs, the project’s bug tracker and mailing list, etc. But since less technical and non-technical people vastly outnumber highly technical people, Google and Bing end up focusing on the needs of the former, at the cost of making search worse for the later. One positive about AI: if an AI is doing the search, it likely wants the more advanced material not the more beginner-focused one. It can take more advanced material and simplify it for the benefit of less experienced users. It is (I suspect) less likely to make mistakes if you ask it to simplify the more advanced material than if you just gave it more beginner-oriented material instead. So if AI starts to replace humans as the main clients of search, that may reverse some of the pressure to “dumb it down”.
- photonthug 2y ago
  > But since less technical and non-technical people vastly outnumber highly technical people, Google and Bing end up focusing on the needs of the former, at the cost of making search worse for the later. I mostly agree with your interesting comment, and I think your analysis basically jives with my sibling comment. But one thing I take issue with is the idea that this type of thing is a good faith effort, because it’s more like a convenient excuse. Explaining substring search or even include/exclude ops to children and grandparents is actually easy. Setting preferences for tutorials vs API docs would also be easy. But companies don’t really want user-directed behavior as much as they want to herd users to preferred content with algorithms, then convince the user it was their idea or at least the result of relatively static ranking processes. The push towards more fuzzy semantic search and “related content” everywhere is not to cater to novice users but to blur the line between paid advertisement and organic user-directed discovery. No need to give megacorp the benefit of the doubt on stuff like this, or make the underlying problems seem harder than they are. All platforms land in this place by convergent evolution wherein the driving forces are money and influence, not insurmountable technical difficulties or good intentions for usability.
- consp 2y ago
cyanydeez 2y ago
If only google was trying to solve search rather than shareholdet values.
skydhash 2y ago
> Traditional search (at least on the web) is dying. That's not my experience at all. While there are scammy sites, using the search engines as an index instead of an oracle still yields useful results. It only requires to learn the keywords which you can do by reading the relevant materials .
- chongli 2y ago
  How do you read the relevant materials if you haven’t found them yet? It’s a chicken and egg problem. If your goal is to become an expert in a subject but you’re currently a novice, search can’t help you if it’s only giving you terrible results until you “crack the code.”
ponector 2y ago
>> No one, including Google, knows what to do about it I'm sure they can. But they have no incentive. Try to Google an item, and it will show you a perfect match of sponsored ads and some other not-so-relevant non-sponsored results
AtlasBarfed 2y ago
There's no way the search AI will beat out the spamgen AI. Tailoring/retraining the main search AI will be so much more expensive that retraining the spam special purpose AIs.
quickthrowman 2y ago
Google could fix the problem if they wanted to, but it’s not in their interests to fix it since the spam sites generally buy ads from Google and/or display Google ads on their spam websites. Google wants to maximize their income, so..
layer8 2y ago
Without a usable web search index, AI will be in trouble eventually as well. There is no substitute for it.
rubyfan 2y ago
AI will make the problem of low quality, fake, fraudulent and arbitrage content way worse. I highly doubt it will improve searching for quality content at all.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
fmos 2y ago
Kagi has fixed traditional search for me.

hawski 2y ago

A human can't be trusted to not make memory safety bugs. At the same time we can trust AI with logic bugs.

kelnos 2y ago
Since LLMs are just based on human output, we should trust LLMs (at best) as much as we trust the average human coder. And in reality we should probably trust them less.

worik 2y ago

> But the vast majority of AI use that I see is...not that. It's just glorified, very expensive search. Since the collapse of Internet search (rose tinted hindsight - was it ever any good?) I have been using a LLM as my syntax advisor. I pay for my own tokens, and I can say it is astonishingly cheap It is also very good.

jcgrillo 2y ago

What I can't wrap my head around is that making good, efficient software doesn't (by and large) take significantly longer than making bloated, inefficient enterprise spaghetti. The problem is finding people to do it with who care enough to think rigorously about what they're going to do before they start doing it. There's this bizarre misconception popular among bigtech managers that there's some tunable tradeoff between quality and development speed. But it doesn't actually work that way at all. I can't even count anymore how many times I've had to explain how taking this or that locally optimal shortcut will make it take longer overall to complete the project. In other words, it's a skill issue. LLMs can only make this worse. Hiring unskilled programmers and giving them a machine for generating garbage isn't the way. Instead, train them, and reject low quality work.

sethammons 2y ago
"Slow is smooth and smooth is fast"
- jcgrillo 2y ago
  It's true every single time.
giantg2 2y ago
"What I can't wrap my head around is that making good, efficient software doesn't (by and large) take significantly longer than making bloated, inefficient enterprise spaghetti." In my opinion the reason we get enterprise spaghetti is largely due to requirement issues and scope creep. It's nearly impossible to create a streamlined system without knowing what it should look like. And once the system gets to a certain size, it's impossible to get business buy-in to rearchitect or refactor to the degree that is necessary. Plus the full requirements are usually poorly documented and long forgotten by that time.
- jcgrillo 2y ago
  When scopes creep and requirements change, simply refactor. Where is it written in The Law that you have to accrue technical debt? EDIT: I'm gonna double down on this one. The fact that your organization thinks they can demand of you that you can magically weathervane your codebase to their changeable whims is evidence that you have failed to realistically communicate to them what is actually possible to do well. The fact that they think it's a move you can make to creep the scope, or change the requirements, is the problem. Every time that happens it should be studied within the organization as a major, costly failure--like an outage or similar. > it's impossible to get business buy-in to rearchitect or refactor to the degree that is necessary That's a choice. There are some other options: - Simply don't get business buy-in. Do without. Form a terrorist cell within your organization. You'll likely outpace them. Or you'll get fired, which means you'll get severance, unemployment, a vacation, and the opportunity to apply to a job at a better company. - Fight viciously for engineering independence. You business people can do the businessing, but us engineers are going to do the engineering. We'll tell you how we'll do it, not the other way. - Build companies around a culture of doing good, consistent work instead of taking expedient shortcuts. They're rare, but they exist!

Dalewyn 2y ago

>We are willing to burn far, far more fuel than necessary because we've decided we can't be bothered with traditional search. That's because traditional search fucking sucks balls.

jihadjihad 2y ago

Another frustration I have with these models is that it is yet another crutch and excuse for turning off your brain. I was tagged on a PR a couple days ago where a coworker had added a GIN index to a column in Postgres, courtesy of GPT-4o, of course. He couldn't pronounce the name of the extension, apparently not noticing that trgm == trigram, or what that might even be. Copying the output from the LLM and pasting it into a PR didn't result in anything other than him checking off a box, moving a ticket in Jira, and then onto the next thing--not even a pretense of being curious about what any of it all meant. But look at those query times now! It's been possible for a while to shut off your brain as a programmer and blindly copy-paste from StackOverflow etc., but the level of enablement that LLMs afford is staggering.

tru3_power 2y ago
Out of curiosity- did it work though?

GaggiX 2y ago

These models are simply much more powerful than a tradition search engine and stackoverflow, so many people use these models for a reason, a friend of mine that never tried ChatGPT until very recently managed to solve a problem he couldn't find a solution on stackoverflow using GPT-4o, next time he's probably going to ask the model directly.

toasteros 2y ago
I don't know what your friend's prompts were, but this probably speaks to the conversational aspect. I've found success in using LLMs to "search" for things I don't know how to search for - a 'tip of my tongue' type scenario. "How do I do a for loop" though is a waste of time and energy and should be put into a search engine. There is no need to use the inefficient power needs of an LLM to answer that question. The search engine will have cached the results of that question, leading to a much faster discovery of the answer, and less power draw to do it, whereas an LLM needs to ponder your question EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. A huge waste. Stop using LLMs for simple things.

braiamp 2y ago

> because we've decided we can't be bothered with traditional search Traditional search was only Google, and Google figured out that they don't need to improve their tools to make it better, because everyone will continue to use it as a force of habit (google is a verb!). Traditional search is being abandoned because traditional search isn't good enough for the kinds of search we need (also, while google may claim their search is very useful, people rarely search stuff nowadays, instead prefer being passively fed content via recommendations algorithm (that also use AI!))

dleeftink 2y ago
Algolia, Marginalia, Kagi, Scopus, ConnectedPapers, Lense[0] all stick to more or less traditional search and yield consistent high quality results. It shouldn't be one or the other, and I think the first one to combine both paradigms in a seamless fashion would be quite successfull (it has been tried, I know, but it's still a niche in many cases). [0]: https://www.lens.org/lens/search/ https://www.lens.org/lens/search/

gonzobonzo 2y ago

Doesn't this get to one of the fundamental issues though, that many of these frameworks and languages are poorly constructed in the first place? A lot of the times people turn to web searches, Stack Overflow, or AI is because they want to do X, and there's no quick, clear, and intuitive way to do X. I write cheat sheets for opaque parts of various frameworks myself. A lot of them aren't fundamentally difficult once you understand them, but they're constructed in an extremely convoluted way, and there's usually extremely poor documentation explaining how to actually use them. In fact, I'd say I use AI more for documentation than I do for code itself, because AI generated documentation is often superior to official documentation. In the end, these things shouldn't be necessary (or barely necessary) if we had well constructed languages, frameworks, libraries and documentation, but it appears like it's easier to build AI than to make things non-convoluted in the first place.