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To AI or not to AI

antropia.studio

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Re: To AI or not to AI

#21

Post by bashy »

goalieca wrote: post #16
wintermutestwin wrote: post #9

I recently spent over an hour trying to get ChatGPT to give me some pretty simple rsync commands. It kept giving me command line parameters that didn't work on the version of rsync on my mac. With ~50% of the failures, it would go down troubleshooting rabbit holes and the rest of the time it would "realize" that it was giving incorrect version responses. I tell it to validate each parameter against my version moving…

> I tell it to validate each parameter against my version moving forward and it clearly doesn't do that. I would like an AI expert to weigh in on this point. I run into this a lot. It seems that LLMs, being language models and all, don't actually understand what i'm asking. Whenever i dive into the math, superficially, it kind of makes sense why they don't. But it also seems like transformers or some secret sauce is…

Words are tokens so it can't really 'see' the word(s), it just knows how to link them.

Re: To AI or not to AI

#22

Post by jrexilius »

qweiopqweiop wrote: post #2

Not asking for feedback is the killer for me. Even most junior developers will ask for more information if they don't have enough context/confidence to complete a task.

I have taken to appending "DO NOT START WRITING CODE." to almost every prompt.. I try to get it to analyze and ask questions and summarize what its going to do first, and even then it will sometimes ignore that and jump into writing (the wrong) code. A big part of the wrangling seems to be getting it to analyze or reason before charging down a wrong path.

Re: To AI or not to AI

#23

Post by mattmanser »

jrexilius wrote: post #22
qweiopqweiop wrote: post #2

Not asking for feedback is the killer for me. Even most junior developers will ask for more information if they don't have enough context/confidence to complete a task.

I have taken to appending "DO NOT START WRITING CODE." to almost every prompt.. I try to get it to analyze and ask questions and summarize what its going to do first, and even then it will sometimes ignore that and jump into writing (the wrong) code. A big part of the wrangling seems to be getting it to analyze or reason before charging down a wrong path.

If you use Claude Code you can go into plan mode, where it doesn't write code, you can back and forth.

Re: To AI or not to AI

#24

Post by mattmanser »

qudat wrote: post #8
qweiopqweiop wrote: post #2

Not asking for feedback is the killer for me. Even most junior developers will ask for more information if they don't have enough context/confidence to complete a task.

GitHub just released spec-kit which I think attempts to get the human more involved in the spec/planning/task building process. You basically instruct the LLM to generate these docs and you tweak them to flesh it out all fix mistakes. Then you tell the LLM to work on a single task at a time, reviewing in small chunks.

That's how everyone is already using Claude Code, it's not GitHub's idea. You go into plan mode, get it to iterate on the idea, then ask it to make (and save) a to do list md. Then you get it to run through the to-do list, checking tasks off as it goes.

Re: To AI or not to AI

#25

Post by wintermutestwin »

heckelson wrote: post #20
wintermutestwin wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of reasons! First off: where else do I go to learn this stuff? Man pages are reference for people who work in CLI all the time and not for virgin learners as they are are necessarily packed with the complete lexicon but with barely a thought to explaining real world examples of common tasks. There are a million Linux websites with the same versioning issues and inadequate explanations. I guess I could buy an ore…

I like the tldr pages to learn the most common features and use cases of new command line tools! I think it's great, albeit, a bit slow sometimes

tldr pages are a great idea, but the execution is a total fail. Looking at the rsync entry, it fails to provide the most blatantly common requirements:

I just needed two commands: one to mirror a folder from one drive to another, updating only the changes (excluding all of the hidden MacOS cruft). And another command to do a deep validation of the copy. These have to be two of the most commonly used commands right???

In the end, I felt that messing around with precious data without being 100% certain of what I am doing just wasn't worth it so I got a GUI app that was intuitive.

Re: To AI or not to AI

#27

Post by erichocean »

wintermutestwin wrote: post #9

I recently spent over an hour trying to get ChatGPT to give me some pretty simple rsync commands. It kept giving me command line parameters that didn't work on the version of rsync on my mac. With ~50% of the failures, it would go down troubleshooting rabbit holes and the rest of the time it would "realize" that it was giving incorrect version responses. I tell it to validate each parameter against my version moving…

Ask Gemini Pro 2.5 to build the rsync command and then give it the man page for your version of rsync. It should succeed the first time.

Here's a command to copy the man page to the clipboard than you can immediately paste into aistudio (on a Mac):

    man rsync | col -b | pbcopy
As a general rule, if you would need to look something up to complete a task, the AI needs the same information you do—but it's your job to provide it.

Re: To AI or not to AI

#28

Post by richardguerre_ »

I don't like vibe coding as much as actual coding, but the biggest improvement in my workflow was shifting left even more.

Now I dedicate at least one session to just writing a spec file, and have it ask me clarifying questions on my requirements and based on what it finds in the codebase and online. I ask it to also break down the implementation plan in phases with a checklist for each phase.

I then start at least one new session per phase and make sure to nail down that phase before continuing.

The nice thing is if it gets annoying to vibe code it, I or someone on my team can just use the spec to implement things.

Re: To AI or not to AI

#29

Post by Ancapistani »

chrisweekly wrote: post #11
wintermutestwin wrote: post #9

I recently spent over an hour trying to get ChatGPT to give me some pretty simple rsync commands. It kept giving me command line parameters that didn't work on the version of rsync on my mac. With ~50% of the failures, it would go down troubleshooting rabbit holes and the rest of the time it would "realize" that it was giving incorrect version responses. I tell it to validate each parameter against my version moving…

Why involve an LLM at all, if you're looking up docs for a particular tool like rsync?

I’m using “aichat”, and have all my man pages in a RAG. It’s far faster to query that than it is for me to read through it manually.
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