Comment by 72deluxe
2 days ago
I did this, but now I have a useful piece of software that I have zero clue regarding how it works. My only chance of "maintaining" it is giving it to another LLM to explain.
I am happy that I have a useful tool, but it simply isn't maintainable without a machine or me investing much time to understand it.
I don't see how the former is a sensible future for humanity. I am happy to say I won't be releasing this software I've created (I will find it useful myself), but deferring all understanding to a black box seems a poor future for brain activity.
One thing I do is ask the LLM to write me a walkthrough of the code. LLMs are pretty good at generating documentation like HTML slideshows or whatever else.
I mean, I've had useful software that I don't understand how it works where I am stuck hoping some small company continues to maintain it. And I've had some of those companies go out of business and leave me with useless software that I eventually have to replace once it no longer works on my machine.
Having the code that I can dump into an LLM to understand myself or have it alter it seems better than that.
It does, but then this admission that I have to feed the code into an LLM for it to generate documentation on how it works is just proving my point that we are now dependent on an LLM to understand the code that the LLM has generated.
It's the equivalent of promoting a sausage factory to be the solution to all of mankind's food problems. It's garbage.
Mermaid is a great output format for this type of information. Flowcharts, sequence diagrams, etc.
> One thing I do is ask the LLM to write me a walkthrough of the code.
I tried that. ChatGPT's result was laden with loud, clear and wrong fabications which I might have believed had I not examined the code.
Unreliable program be unreliable.