Hacker News Reader

Comment by jai_ | Hacker News Reader

I sincerly hope that they remove this feature and apologise for its integration in the first place.

I don't think a reference website should include any sort of feature that can hallucinate incorrect documentation for you on demand.

It's bad enough that they have to include a disclaimer[1] on their upsell page, which states that the "AI Help" may occassionally return incorrect results.

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/plus/ai-help

View on HN

Please no. The site is an important resource for people learning JS and other web technologies and AI is great at explaining code snippets which would otherwise be follow-up look-ups and at explaining what the often very dense MDN content means. And AI is actually really good at generating code as well, you just have to review it like it was written by a junior dev.

I think most of the hate for current AI tools comes from the fact that people expect the computer from Star Trek which always provides perfect answers.

Edit: So yes, it needs to be made super obvious to users that it might give you wrong answers.

Except it gets mostly everything wrong, even very simple things that are on the page itself.

https://github.com/mdn/yari/issues/9208

I'm really not sure how you can argue that "AI is great at explaining code snippets" while also acknowledging that it will just give you flat out wrong answers some times.

Either it's good at explaining and is right, or is bad at explaining and is wrong.

Applying the logic of it being "right most of the time" seems really bad for a tool applied to a reference documentation website.

Sorry, if that wasn't clear but I think MDN is not only reference documentation. I agree, for the reference part the AI shouldn't do more than trying to point you to the right parts of the text. But for learning things, nice explanations, even if sometimes slightly off, can be a lot better to digest than reference documentation.

I'm not saying it's great yet, but there is potential for having something that can hand-wave away some details like a human would when explaining something to a beginner.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com