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Could you elaborate?
by theletterf 1y ago
Could you elaborate?
- righthand 1y agoWell you’ve noticed a trend: > I’ve been noticing a trend among developers that use AI: they are increasingly writing and structuring docs in context folders so that the AI powered tools they use can build solutions autonomously and with greater accuracy To me this means a lot of engineers are spending time maintaining files that help them automate a few things for their job. But sinking all that time into context for an LLM is most likely going to net you efficiency gains only for the projects that the context was originally written for. Other projects might benefit from smaller parts of these files, but if engineers are really doing this then there probably is some efficiency lost in the creation and management of it all. If I had to guess contrary to your post is that devs aren’t RTFM, but instead asking Llm or web search what a good rule/context/limitation would be and pasting it into a file. In which case the use of Llms is a complexity shift.
- theletterf 1y agoI think some are doing just that, yes, which I guess would only increase entropy. So it's not just curation, but also design through words. Good old specs, if you want.
- righthand 1y agoSure but the specs are informal and unadaptable then. Usually a specification follows some sort of guiding format and organized thought. Usually abstracted from the whims of the author to make the spec clear. Context files are what? Dev notes and cheat sheet?
- theletterf 1y agoI'm hoping they'll be the docs themselves, written before the project is out.
- righthand 1y agoIt’s a great thought and this track has led me to wonder why no one is trying to build applications from BDD/gherkin statements. It’s hard for me to believe that people are writing more technical documentation, understanding more, when they want to use the Llm to bypass that. Maybe a handful of disciplined engineers per capita but when the trend is largely the opposite, the academic approach tends to lose out.
- bluGill 1y agobdd/gherkin are sometimes useful but they are not a great format to capture all the comblexity of the problem.
- righthand 1y agoPeople don’t want to capture complexity of a problem, they want to play with word legos to output a prefabbed product. The simpler the interface the more likely that interface will win regardless how much nuance and expressiveness is allowed with a full language system.
- MoreQARespect 1y agoGherkin was always a pretty bad format that made it difficult to write terse, clear spectests. Inevitably the people who used it made horribly repetitive or horribly vague gherkin files that were equally bad for BDD and testing. This is an artefact of the language which the creators are in total denial about. There are better languages for writing executable user stories but none very popular.
- fmbb 1y agoWe already have README, and API specs, and Jira, and Confluence, and RFCs are freely available. Why do these "agents" need so much hand holding?
- groestl 1y agoBecause they are like very eager Junior devs.