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It’s great at doing stuff that is routine, well-understood, done and documented and discussed many times before. “Boilerplate”. But also summarization, brainsto
by jitl 2y ago
It’s great at doing stuff that is routine, well-understood, done and documented and discussed many times before. “Boilerplate”. But also summarization, brainstorming, assisting a human unfamiliar with the body of knowledge.
It is bad at doing novel things or subtlety. For example when I ask for help with Postgres queries, LLMs frequently give me made-up syntax or combine features from several different databases like Oracle, MS-SQL, Postgres into a single answer.
- ynniv 2y agoDid you provide the same reference material that a developer would use?
- rsynnott 2y ago> For example when I ask for help with Postgres queries I’m really quite surprised that people trust these things to do this, because it is _particularly_ easy to subtly screw up in SQL. Probably quite a few of the queries that ‘work’ are also incorrect. Have you considered, well, reading a book and learning to do it yourself? There is value to knowing how things work (and without having at least some understanding of how a database works, you are going to struggle to write performant, correct queries for it). Asking a magic robot for its best guesses is never going to produce a great result.
- jitl 2y agoRude comment. I know how to write SQL.