←back to thread

631 points kiyanwang | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.222s | source
Show context
kshri24 ◴[] No.43630227[source]

Can't find any fault in this article. Agree with pretty much everything except for one point:

"Don’t go to Stack Overflow, don’t ask the LLM, don’t guess, just go straight to the source. Oftentimes, it’s surprisingly accessible and well-written."

It has been, I think, close to 15+ years since I have been actively coding professionally. I am always learning. When I started my career I spent a fair bit of time answering questions on Stack Overflow rather than asking questions. That helped a lot as it felt like a "Real-World challenge" to solve someone else's problem. So it totally depends on how you use Stack Overflow.

With LLMs, I don't use it for "vibe coding" as the kids do these days. This is, IMHO, a wrong way to use LLMs. LLMs are great for integrations into software you are building where it has to analyze realtime events and produce summaries, or even for automating mundane things. But it definitely is not a replacement for a programmer. At least not in its current incarnation. The way to use LLMs is to ask it to provide a birds-eye/10,000 ft view on a topic you want to understand/explore. Why? Because sometimes, you don't even know how something works because you have no idea what it is called (technical terminology/jargon). That's where LLMs help. Once you know the terms/jargon, you can then refer to official documentation/papers rather than relying on the LLM. This IMHO is an underrated superpower of LLMs.

replies(7): >>43630280 #>>43630295 #>>43630406 #>>43630448 #>>43630865 #>>43632681 #>>43634007 #
1. lacn ◴[] No.43630280[source]

Love this, I have the same view. I use them for search in cases where I have to circumlocute and can't quite say what I mean (I found an old book I could only remember very vague broad strokes about this way when no search engine could do it) and for "framework" questions, e.g. what is this about and how do the pieces relate, which I would go so far to say is another type of search problem (it's search where I'm starting from zero). I still have to take it with a grain of salt but to your point it's enough to familiarize me with "landmarks" in the information space and then to start building more solid understanding from that foundation.