← Back to context

Comment by cosmic_cheese

6 days ago

Though I haven’t embraced LLM codegen (except for non-functional filler/test data), the fuzziness is why I like to use them as talking documentation. It makes for a lot less of fumbling around in the dark trying to figure out the magic combination of search keywords to surface the information needed, which can save a lot of time in aggregate.

Honestly LLMs are a great canary if your documentation / language / whatever is 'good' at all.

I wish I would have kept it around but had ran into an issue where the LLM wasn't giving a great answer. Look at the documentation, and yea, made no sense. And all the forum stuff about it was people throwing out random guessing on how it should actually work.

If you're a company that makes something even moderately popular and LLMs are producing really bad answers there is one of two things happening.

1. Your a consulting company that makes their money by selling confused users solutions to your crappy product 2. Your documentation is confusing crap.

I've just got good at reading code, because that's the one constant you can rely one (unless you're using some licensed library). So whenever the reference is not enough, I just jump straight to the code (one of my latest examples is finding out that opendoas (a sudo replacement) hard code the persist option for not asking password to 5 minutes).