Yeah, once you get the LLM's response you still have to go to the documentation to check whether it's telling the truth and the APIs it recommends are current. You're no better off than if you did an internet search and tried to figure out who's giving good advice, or just fumbled your own way through the docs in the first place.

[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

You’re no better off than if you did an internet search and tried to figure out who’s giving good advice, or just fumbled your own way through the docs in the first place.

These have their own problems ime. Often the documentation (if it exists) won't tell you how to do something, or it's really buried, or inaccurate. Sometimes the person posting StackOverflow answers didn't actually try running their code, and it doesn't run without errors. There are a lot of situations where a LLM will somehow give you better answers than these options. It's inconsistent, and the reverse is true also, but the most efficient way to do it is to use all of these options situationally and as backups to each other.

[–] floofloof@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Yes, it can be useful in leading you to look in the right place for more information, or orienting you with the basics when you're working with a technology that's new to you. But I think it wastes my time as often as not.

[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 week ago

That's implying that the quality of information from other sources is always better, but I'm saying that's sometimes not true; when you're trying to figure out the syntax for something, documentation and search engines have failed you, and the traditional next step would be to start contacting people or trying to find the answer in unfamiliar source code, sometimes a LLM can somehow just tell you the answer at that point and save the trouble. Of course you have to test that answer because more often than not it will just make up a fake one but that just takes a few seconds.

There are some situations I'm going back to search engines as a first option though, like error messages, LLMs seem to like to get tunnel vision on the literal topic of the error, while search results will show you an unintuitive solution to the same problem if it's a very common one.

load more comments (3 replies)