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Comment by JohnMakin | Hacker News Reader

This is not really a new problem, the previous version being "idk, I copy pasted it from stack overflow." True expertise realized that the answer often lay buried in sub-comments and the top voted answer is not often the correct one. LLM's naturally do not realize any of this.

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At least “copy paste from stack overflow” was kind of a in joke. There was a little social stigma about it. Everyone knew they were being lazy and they really shouldn’t be doing it.

LLMs are different because devs declare with pride that they “saved so much time” by just letting chatGPT do it for them.

I kind of disagree.

chatgpt will make something that looks much more like it should work than your copy-pasted code from stackoverflow. It looks like it does exactly what you want. It's just riddled with bugs. Major (invented an api out of whole cloth; it would sure be convenient if that api did exist tho!) or subtle (oh, this bash script will bedshit and even overwrite data if your paths have spaces.) Or it will happily combine code across major api revisions of eg bootstrap.

I still use it all the time; I just think it makes already-expert users faster while being of much more limited use to people who are not yet experts. In the above case, after being told to make the paths space safe it did so correctly. You just had to know to do that...

You’re kind of saying some of what I am trying to so I’m not sure we disagree. I boil down the core problem described to being roughly: people lacking expertise to judge code advice critically are putting bad code they do not understand into places they shouldn’t. This is the problem that is not new. LLM’s are a variation on the problem because they have the downside of not allowing you to view for yourself the surrounding context to determine on your own what the correct answer is. The fact they are so convincing at it is a different, but definitely new and horrific problem on its own.

Meta commentary on this, I honestly don’t mind if this is the hell that the business/management world wants to build for themselves. I’ll make a fortune cleaning it up.

> The fact they are so convincing at it is a different, but definitely new and horrific problem on its own.

I tried one to help me get the syntax right for the config file for a program. It started by generating a config file for the latest version and not the old one I was using, but once I told it that, it fixed that convincingly and spit out a config file that looked like it was for my version.

However, the reason I asked for help was that the feature was very badly documented, and yet ChatGPT happily invented syntax for the thing I was having problems with. And every time I told it that it didn't look quite right, it confidently invented new syntax for the feature. Everything it made up looked pretty damn convincing, if I had designed the config file format I could have gone with either of those suggestions, but they were all wrong, as evidenced by the config file validator in the program.

At least Stack Overflow had comments and votes that helped you gauge the usefulness of the answer. These glorified toasters have neither.

Ah, you're right, apologies for not reading your comment more carefully.

Almost every “Copy-Paste from SO” answer was accompanied with lots of caveats from other human commentators. This feedback loop is sorely missing with LLM coding assistants.

LLMs literally read all that commentary in training, so they're taking it into account, not regurgitating the top-voted answer from SO. They're arguably better at this than junior devs.

While LLMs are better at reading the surrounding context, I am not convinced they are particularly good at taking it on board (compared to an adult human, obviously fantastic compared to any previous NLP).

Biggest failure mode I experience with LLMs is a very human-like pattern, what looks like corresponding with an interlocutor who absolutely does not understand a core point you raised 5 messages earlier and have re-emphasised on each incorrect response:

>>> x

>> y

> not y, x

oh, right, I see… y

etc.

That isn’t how they work and that’s probably why you’re being downvoted

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