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> LLMs can get me up to speed on new APIs and libraries far faster than I can myself, a gigantic speedup. If I need to write a small bit of glue code in a langu

> LLMs can get me up to speed on new APIs and libraries far faster than I can myself, a gigantic speedup. If I need to write a small bit of glue code in a language I do not know, LLMs not only save me time, but they make it so I don't have to learn something that I'll likely never use again. I wax and wane on this one. I've had the same feelings, but too often I've peaked behind the curtain, read the docs and got familiar with external dependencies and then realize whatever the LLM responds with paradoxically either wasn't following convention or tried to shoehorn your problem to fit code examples found online, used features inappropriately, took a long roundabout path to do something that can be done simply, etc. It can feel like magic until you look too closely at it, and I worry that it'll make me complacent with the feeling of understanding without actually taking away an understanding.

SchemaLoad 1y ago
Yeah LLMs get me _an_ answer far faster than I could find it myself, but it's often not correct. And then I have to verify it myself which was exactly the work I was trying to skip by using the LLM to start with. If I have to manually verify every answer, I may as well read the docs myself.
- Onawa 1y ago
  It doesn't completely solve this problem but definitely helps to have something like context7 MCP server running that `Copilot et al.` can reach dramatically reduces hallucinations for most tools. And additionally I've used Continue.dev VSCode along with manually specified docs and guides that you can selectively inject into your context. Both of those tactics make a huge difference in answer quality.
- emodendroket 1y ago
  Is it really that different from scrolling through Stack Overflow answers and rejecting the ones that aren't suitable? A lot of times you can tell it what specifically you didn't like about the solution and get another crack anyway (e.g., "let's iterate over the characters to do this rather than using a regex")
  - mrkeen 1y ago
    It's a little different. You pay money, have vendor lock-in, get one answer, and there's no upvotes/downvotes/accepted-answers/moderation or clarification.
  - sotix 1y ago
    I wasn't using stack overflow before LLMs. It had already declined too much in quality and discouraged me from posting legitimate questions on there. I was more focused on reading documentation to gain a solid understanding. So for me, it's a much different experience. It's incredible how quickly an LLM can answer. I've also crossed checked its responses with documentation before and discovered that it suggested implementing a deprecated feature that had a massive warning banner in the documentation that the LLM failed to indicate. I'm still a fan of reading documentation.
  - HankStallone 1y ago
    I've asked AIs for help in doing things in Salesforce, and the answers tend to be a 50/50 mix of correct steps and garbage. It's not hard to see why, because there's a lot of garbage on support sites, much of it because it's outdated. Garbage in, garbage out. The difference is that if I go directly to the support site, there's a decent chance I can quickly spot and reject the garbage based on the date, the votes it's gotten, even the quality of the writing. AI doesn't include any of those clues; it mixes good and bad together and offers it up for me to pick apart through trial and error.
    - jdiff 1y ago
      Lot of support sites are AI generated themselves now. Lenovo's support site is absolute garbage, it has entire articles dedicated to explaining how to use your laptop's screen as a monitor by setting the HDMI to INPUT instead of OUTPUT, something flatly not possible on any laptop. Also mentions VGA and DVI in 2025, something no laptop they sell features.
nicklaf 1y ago
Personally, I don't trust LLMs to write code for me, generally speaking. That said, as of late I've been very pleased with the whole "shoehorn your problem to fit code examples found online" thing these LLMs do, in the very special case of massaging unix scripts, and where the "code examples found online" part seems to mostly amount to making fairly canonical reference to features documented in man pages that are plastered all over the web and haven't changed much in decades. For questions that I know should have a straightforward answer, I think it beats searching Stackoverflow. Sure, I'll typically end up having to rewrite most of the script from scratch; however, if I give it a crude starting point of a half-functional script I've already got going, pairing that with very clear instructions on how I'd like it extended is usually enough to get it to write a proof of concept demonstration that contains enough insightful suggestions for me to spend some time reading about features in man pages I hadn't yet thought to use. The biggest problem maybe is a propensity for these models to stick in every last fancy feature under the sun. It's fun to read about a GNU extension to awk that makes my script a couple lines shorter, but at best I'll take this as an educational aside than something I'd accept at the expense of portability.
culopatin 1y ago
Before accepting an answer I’ve started asking “is there a simpler more straight forward way of achieving that?” Ans most of the time it changes the whole thing it just wrote lol

SchemaLoad 1y ago

Yeah LLMs get me _an_ answer far faster than I could find it myself, but it's often not correct. And then I have to verify it myself which was exactly the work I was trying to skip by using the LLM to start with. If I have to manually verify every answer, I may as well read the docs myself.

Onawa 1y ago
It doesn't completely solve this problem but definitely helps to have something like context7 MCP server running that `Copilot et al.` can reach dramatically reduces hallucinations for most tools. And additionally I've used Continue.dev VSCode along with manually specified docs and guides that you can selectively inject into your context. Both of those tactics make a huge difference in answer quality.
emodendroket 1y ago
Is it really that different from scrolling through Stack Overflow answers and rejecting the ones that aren't suitable? A lot of times you can tell it what specifically you didn't like about the solution and get another crack anyway (e.g., "let's iterate over the characters to do this rather than using a regex")
- mrkeen 1y ago
  It's a little different. You pay money, have vendor lock-in, get one answer, and there's no upvotes/downvotes/accepted-answers/moderation or clarification.
- sotix 1y ago
  I wasn't using stack overflow before LLMs. It had already declined too much in quality and discouraged me from posting legitimate questions on there. I was more focused on reading documentation to gain a solid understanding. So for me, it's a much different experience. It's incredible how quickly an LLM can answer. I've also crossed checked its responses with documentation before and discovered that it suggested implementing a deprecated feature that had a massive warning banner in the documentation that the LLM failed to indicate. I'm still a fan of reading documentation.
- HankStallone 1y ago
  I've asked AIs for help in doing things in Salesforce, and the answers tend to be a 50/50 mix of correct steps and garbage. It's not hard to see why, because there's a lot of garbage on support sites, much of it because it's outdated. Garbage in, garbage out. The difference is that if I go directly to the support site, there's a decent chance I can quickly spot and reject the garbage based on the date, the votes it's gotten, even the quality of the writing. AI doesn't include any of those clues; it mixes good and bad together and offers it up for me to pick apart through trial and error.
  - jdiff 1y ago
    Lot of support sites are AI generated themselves now. Lenovo's support site is absolute garbage, it has entire articles dedicated to explaining how to use your laptop's screen as a monitor by setting the HDMI to INPUT instead of OUTPUT, something flatly not possible on any laptop. Also mentions VGA and DVI in 2025, something no laptop they sell features.

nicklaf 1y ago

Personally, I don't trust LLMs to write code for me, generally speaking. That said, as of late I've been very pleased with the whole "shoehorn your problem to fit code examples found online" thing these LLMs do, in the very special case of massaging unix scripts, and where the "code examples found online" part seems to mostly amount to making fairly canonical reference to features documented in man pages that are plastered all over the web and haven't changed much in decades. For questions that I know should have a straightforward answer, I think it beats searching Stackoverflow. Sure, I'll typically end up having to rewrite most of the script from scratch; however, if I give it a crude starting point of a half-functional script I've already got going, pairing that with very clear instructions on how I'd like it extended is usually enough to get it to write a proof of concept demonstration that contains enough insightful suggestions for me to spend some time reading about features in man pages I hadn't yet thought to use. The biggest problem maybe is a propensity for these models to stick in every last fancy feature under the sun. It's fun to read about a GNU extension to awk that makes my script a couple lines shorter, but at best I'll take this as an educational aside than something I'd accept at the expense of portability.

culopatin 1y ago

Before accepting an answer I’ve started asking “is there a simpler more straight forward way of achieving that?” Ans most of the time it changes the whole thing it just wrote lol