6 ms·

In my case, I enjoy writing code too, but it's helpful to have an assistant I can ask to handle small tasks so I can focus on a specific part that requires atte

by nyadesu 10mo ago

In my case, I enjoy writing code too, but it's helpful to have an assistant I can ask to handle small tasks so I can focus on a specific part that requires attention to detail

FeteCommuniste 10mo ago
Yeah, I sometimes use AI for questions like "is it possible to do [x] using library [y] and if so, how?" and have received mostly solid answers.
- nottorp 10mo ago
  Just be careful if functionality varies between library y version 2 and library y version 3, or if there is a similarly named library y2 that isn't the same. You may get possibilities, but not for what you asked for.
  - pdntspa 10mo ago
    If you run to the point where you can execute each idea and examine its outputs, problems like that surface pretty quickly
    - nottorp 10mo ago
      Of course, by that time i could have read the docs for library y the version I'm using...
      - pdntspa 10mo ago
        There are many roads to Rome...
- stouset 10mo ago
  Or “can you prototype doing A via approaches X, Y, and Z, and show me what each looks like?” I love to prototype various approaches. Sometimes I just want to see which one feels like the most natural fit. The LLM can do this in a tenth of the time I can, and I just need to get a general idea of how each approach would feel in practice.
  - skydhash 10mo ago
    > Sometimes I just want to see which one feels like the most natural fit. This sentence alone is a huge red flag in my books. Either you know the problem domain and can argue about which solution is better and why. Or you don't and what you're doing are experiment to learn the domain. There's a reason the field is called Software Engineering and not Software Art. Words like "feels" does not belongs. It would be like saying which bridge design feels like the most natural fit for the load. Or which material feels like the most natural fit for a break system.
    - mjr00 10mo ago
      > There's a reason the field is called Software Engineering and not Software Art. Words like "feels" does not belongs. Software development is nowhere near advanced enough for this to be true. Even basic questions like "should this project be built in Go, Python, or Rust?" or "should this project be modeled using OOP and domain-driven design, event-sourcing, or purely functional programming?" are decided largely by the personal preferences of whoever the first developer is.
      - skydhash 10mo ago
        Such questions may be decided by personal preferences, but their impact can easily be demonstrated. Such impacts are what F. Brooks calls accidental complexity and we generally called technical debt. It's just that, unlike other engineering fields, there are not a lot of physical constraints and the decision space have much more dimensions.
        mjr00 10mo ago
        > Such questions may be decided by personal preferences, but their impact can easily be demonstrated. I really don't think this is true. What was the demonstrated impact of writing Terraform in Go rather than Rust? Would writing Terraform in Rust have resulted in a better product? Would rewriting it now result in a better product? Even among engineers with 15 years experience you're going to get differing answers on this.
- georgemcbay 10mo ago
  > Yeah, I sometimes use AI for questions like "is it possible to do [x] using library [y] and if so, how?" and have received mostly solid answers. In my experience most LLMs are going to answer this with some form of "Absolutely!" and then propose a square-peg-into-a-round-hole way to do it that is likely suboptimal vs using a different library that is far more suited to your problem if you didn't guess the right fit library to begin with. The sycophancy problem is still very real even when the topic is entirely technical. Gemini is (in my experience) the least likely to lead you astray in these situations but its still a significant problem even there.
  - jessoteric 10mo ago
    IME this has been significantly reduced in newer models like 4.5 Opus and to a lesser extent Sonnet, but agree it's still sort of bad- mainly because the question you're posing is bad. if you ask a human this the answer can also often be "yes [if we torture the library]", because software development is magic and magic is the realm of imagination. much better prompt: "is this library designed to solve this problem" or "how can we solve this problem? i am considering using this library to do so, is that realistic?"

by nyadesu 10mo ago

In my case, I enjoy writing code too, but it's helpful to have an assistant I can ask to handle small tasks so I can focus on a specific part that requires attention to detail

FeteCommuniste 10mo ago

Yeah, I sometimes use AI for questions like "is it possible to do [x] using library [y] and if so, how?" and have received mostly solid answers.

nottorp 10mo ago
Just be careful if functionality varies between library y version 2 and library y version 3, or if there is a similarly named library y2 that isn't the same. You may get possibilities, but not for what you asked for.
- pdntspa 10mo ago
  If you run to the point where you can execute each idea and examine its outputs, problems like that surface pretty quickly
  - nottorp 10mo ago
    Of course, by that time i could have read the docs for library y the version I'm using...
    - pdntspa 10mo ago
      There are many roads to Rome...
stouset 10mo ago
Or “can you prototype doing A via approaches X, Y, and Z, and show me what each looks like?” I love to prototype various approaches. Sometimes I just want to see which one feels like the most natural fit. The LLM can do this in a tenth of the time I can, and I just need to get a general idea of how each approach would feel in practice.
- skydhash 10mo ago
  > Sometimes I just want to see which one feels like the most natural fit. This sentence alone is a huge red flag in my books. Either you know the problem domain and can argue about which solution is better and why. Or you don't and what you're doing are experiment to learn the domain. There's a reason the field is called Software Engineering and not Software Art. Words like "feels" does not belongs. It would be like saying which bridge design feels like the most natural fit for the load. Or which material feels like the most natural fit for a break system.
  - mjr00 10mo ago
    > There's a reason the field is called Software Engineering and not Software Art. Words like "feels" does not belongs. Software development is nowhere near advanced enough for this to be true. Even basic questions like "should this project be built in Go, Python, or Rust?" or "should this project be modeled using OOP and domain-driven design, event-sourcing, or purely functional programming?" are decided largely by the personal preferences of whoever the first developer is.
    - skydhash 10mo ago
      Such questions may be decided by personal preferences, but their impact can easily be demonstrated. Such impacts are what F. Brooks calls accidental complexity and we generally called technical debt. It's just that, unlike other engineering fields, there are not a lot of physical constraints and the decision space have much more dimensions.
      - mjr00 10mo ago
        > Such questions may be decided by personal preferences, but their impact can easily be demonstrated. I really don't think this is true. What was the demonstrated impact of writing Terraform in Go rather than Rust? Would writing Terraform in Rust have resulted in a better product? Would rewriting it now result in a better product? Even among engineers with 15 years experience you're going to get differing answers on this.
georgemcbay 10mo ago
> Yeah, I sometimes use AI for questions like "is it possible to do [x] using library [y] and if so, how?" and have received mostly solid answers. In my experience most LLMs are going to answer this with some form of "Absolutely!" and then propose a square-peg-into-a-round-hole way to do it that is likely suboptimal vs using a different library that is far more suited to your problem if you didn't guess the right fit library to begin with. The sycophancy problem is still very real even when the topic is entirely technical. Gemini is (in my experience) the least likely to lead you astray in these situations but its still a significant problem even there.
- jessoteric 10mo ago
  IME this has been significantly reduced in newer models like 4.5 Opus and to a lesser extent Sonnet, but agree it's still sort of bad- mainly because the question you're posing is bad. if you ask a human this the answer can also often be "yes [if we torture the library]", because software development is magic and magic is the realm of imagination. much better prompt: "is this library designed to solve this problem" or "how can we solve this problem? i am considering using this library to do so, is that realistic?"