Comment by mgraczyk
13 hours ago
Yes you have to be careful, but the LLM will read and process core and documentation literally millions of times faster than you, so it's worth it
13 hours ago
Yes you have to be careful, but the LLM will read and process core and documentation literally millions of times faster than you, so it's worth it
I mean, is it really that hard to find information in the docs?
Like, if I want to find out what, I don't know, "GetQueuedCompletionStatus" does. I google
GetQueuedCompletionStatus
Find this page:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/ioapiset...
Bam, that's the single source of truth right there. Microsoft's docs are pretty great
If I use an LLM, I have to ask it for the documentation about "GetQueuedCompletionStatus". Then I have to double check its output, because LLMs hallaucinate
Doubly checking its output involves googling "GetQueuedCompletionStatus", finding this page:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/ioapiset...
And then reading the docs to validate whether or not what its told me is correct. How does this save me any time?
How about we do the following.
I have not done win32 programming in 12 years. Maybe you've done it more recently. I'll use an LLM and you look up things manually. We can see, who can build a win32 admin UI that shows a realtime view of every open file by process with sorting, filtering and search on both the files and process/command names.
I estimate this will take me 5 minutes Would you like to race?
This mentality is fundamentally why I think AI is not that useful, it completely underscores everything that's wrong with software engineering and what makes a very poor quality senior developer
I'll write an application without AI that has to be maintained for 5 years with an ever evolving featureset, and you can write your own with AI, and see which codebase is easiest to maintain, the most productive to add new features to, and has the fewest bugs and best performance
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Why does it matter? We have table of contents, index and references for books and other contents. That’s a lot of navigational aid. Also they help in providing you a general overview of the domain.