421–430 of 432 posts
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Oh, how nice it must be to complain about Slack. Try using Teams and you will never want to complain about Slack again.
Slack is way worse than Teams. I honestly rather dislike both and rather use email only, but will pick Teams over Slack any time.
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I use LLMs several times a day, and I think for me the issue is that verification is typically much faster than learning/writing. For example, I've never spent much time getting good at scripting. Sure, probably a gap I should resolve, but I feel like LLMs do a great job at it. And what I need to script is typically easy to verify, I don't need to spend time learning how to do things like, "move the files of this ext…
I think you and the parent comment are onto something. I also feel like the parent since I find it relatively difficult to read code that someone else wrote. My brain easily gets biased into thinking that the cases that the code is covering are the only possible ones. On the flip side, if I were writing the code, I am more likely to determine the corner cases. In other words, writing code helps me think, reading just…
Maybe it’s bc I’ve been programming since I was young or because I mainly learned by doing code-along books, but writing the code is where my thinking gets done.
I don’t usually plan, then write code. I write code, understand the problem space, then write better code.
I’ve known friends and coworkers who liked to plan out a change in psudocode or some notes before getting into coding.
Maybe these different approaches benefit from AI differently.
Boy does this feel like the author has never actually used any AI tools for writing code.
I had the same feeling reading this, but a large number of developers struggle to communicate verbally and would hate a chat based interface. Some years ago, I worked with a very intelligent person who had come into development with math-related degree. We tried a pair-programming exercise, and he got visibly angry, flustered and frustrated when he tried to verbalize what he was doing. One of the reasons Business Ana…
But talking to an AI about code feels much more like programming than talking to another programmer.
Yep. 100% agree. The whole “chat as UX” metaphor is a cul-de-sac that I’m sure we’ll back out of sooner or later. I think about this like SQL in the late 80s. At the time, SQL was the “next big thing” that was going to mean we didn’t need programmers, and that management could “write code”. It didn’t quite work out that way, of course, as we all know. I see chat-based interfaces to LLMs going exactly the same way. Th…
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in my experience, if you can't explain something to someone else then you don't fully understand it our brains like to jump over inconsistencies or small gaps in our logic when working by themselves, but try to explain that same concept to someone else and those inconsistencies and gaps become glaringly obvious (doubly so if the other person starts asking questions you never considered) it's why pair programming and…
Or maybe your in the process of building it and that’s why you cannot understand it: it does not exist yet.
I'm growing to the idea that chat is a bad UI pattern, period. It is a great record of correspondence, I think. But it is a terrible UI for doing anything. In large, I assert this is because the best way to do something is to do that thing. There can be correspondence around the thing, but the artifacts that you are building are separate things. You could probably take this further and say that narrative is a terribl…
Yes, agree. Chatting with a computer has all the worst attributes of talking to a person, without any of the intuitive understanding, nonverbal cues, even tone of voice, that all add meaning when two human beings talk to each other.
It's a CLI without the integrity. When you bought a 386, it came with a big book that said "MS-DOS 4.01" and enumerated the 75 commands you can type at the C:\> prompt and actually make something useful happen.
When you argue with ChatGPT, its whole business is to not tell you what those 75 commands are. Maybe your prompt fits its core competency and you'll get exactly what you wanted. Maybe it's hammering what you said into a shape it can parse and producing marginal garbage. Maybe it's going to hallucinate from nothing. But it's going to hide that behind a bunch of cute language and hopefully you'll just keep pulling the gacha and blaming yourself if it's not right.
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Your script example is a good one, but the nice thing about scripting is when you learn the semantic of it. Like the general pattern of find -> filter/transform -> select -> action. It’s very easy to come up with a one liner that can be trivially modified to adapt it to another context. More often than not, I find LLMs generate overly complicated scripts.
It's astounding how often I ask an LLM to generate some thing, do a little more research, come back and I'm ready to use the code it generated and I realize, no, it's selected the wrong flags entirely. Although most recently I caught it because I fed it into both gpt-4o and o1 and o1 had the correct flags. Then I asked 4o to expand the flags from the short form to the long form and explain them so I could double-chec…
It was already wrong once.
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Slack is way worse than Teams. I honestly rather dislike both and rather use email only, but will pick Teams over Slack any time.
how? scrolling up a conversation takes hours, this alone makes me cry if i have to use it
Funnily, this is the exact same issue I have with Slack.
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> But with coding models they ignore context of the codebase and the results feel more like patchwork. Have you tried Cursor? It has a great feature that grabs context from the codebase, I use it all the time.
I can't get the prompt because I'm on my work computer but I have about a three-quarter-page instruction set in the settings of cursor, it asks clarifying questions a LOT now, and is pretty liberal with adding in commented pseudo-code for stuff it isn't sure about. You can still trip it up if you try, but it's a lot better than stock. This is with Sonnet 3.5 agent chats (composer I think it's called?) I actually canc…
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> A lot of our job is to do a lot of inference in figuring out what our managers are even asking us to make This is why I think LLMs can't really replace developers. 80% of my job is already trying to figure out what's actually needed, despite being given lots of text detail, maybe even spec, or prototype code. Building the wrong thing fast is about as useful as not building anything at all. (And before someone says…
> For any problem there are infinite number of wrong solutions, but only a handful of ones that yield success, why waste time trying all the wrong ones? Devil's advocate: because unless you're working in heavily dysfunctional organization, or are doing a live coding interview, you're not playing "guess the password" with your management. Most of the time, they have even less of a clue about how the right solution loo…
We as developers are tasked with figuring out what the problem is, especially in cases where the client is wrong about their assumptions