Comment by permo-w
2 days ago
it built the meat of the code, you spent 5 minutes fixing the more complex and esoteric issues. is this not the desired situation? you saved time, but your skillset remained viable
> AI's fine for well-trodden roads. It's awful if you're beating your own path, and especially bad at treading a new path just alongside a superhighway in the training data.
I very much agree with this, although I think that it can be ameliorated significantly with clever prompting
I sincerely wish that had been the case. No, I built the meat of the code. The most common benefit is helping to reducing repetitive typing, letting me skip writing 12 minor variations of `x1 = sin(r1) - cos(r2)`.
Similar to that, in this project it's been handy translating whole mathematical formulas to actual code processes. But when it comes out of that very narrow box it makes an absolute mess of things that almost always ends in a net waste of time. I roped it into that pointer capture issue earlier because it's an unfamiliar API to me, and apparently for it, too, because it hallucinated some fine wild goose chases for me.
wrt unfamiliar APIs, I don't know if this would have worked in your case (perhaps not) but I find that most modern LLMs are very comfortable with simply reading and using the docs or sample code here and now if you pass them the link or a copy paste or html containing the relevant info