← Back to context

Comment by kragen

7 months ago

From https://tonsky.me/blog/gaslight-driven-development/ today:

> Any person who has used a computer in the past ten years knows that doing meaningless tasks is just part of the experience. Millions of people create accounts, confirm emails, dismiss notifications, solve captchas, reject cookies, and accept terms and conditions—not because they particularly want to or even need to. They do it because that’s what the computer told them to do. Like it or not, we are already serving the machines. (...)

> You might’ve heard a story of Soundslice [adding a feature because ChatGPT kept telling people it exists](https://www.holovaty.com/writing/chatgpt-fake-feature/). We see the same at Instant: for example, we used `tx.update` for both inserting and updating entities, but LLMs kept writing `tx.create` instead. Guess what: we now have `tx.create`, too.

> Is it good or is it bad? It definitely feels strange. In a sense, it’s helpful: LLMs here have seen millions of other APIs and are suggesting the most obvious thing, something every developer would think of first, too.

> It’s also a unique testing device: if developers use your API wrong, they blame themselves, read the documentation, and fix their code. In the end, you might never learn that they even had the problem. But with ChatGPT, you yourself can experience “newbie’s POV” at any time.