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Comment by potatoicecoffee | Hacker News Reader

I like looking at stack overflow for coding examples and seeing a couple of nerds getting angry at each other about the best way to do stuff. or some interesting other ways of doing stuff. this is also why i come to HN! so its weird when people want to drop that small joy from their workday

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It's hard to keep that mindset after a while. People get tired of the same old pattern that's just ever so slightly different than last time. When something becomes repetitive you get bored of it. Or if the complexity of the solution you're working on is brought by a lot of moving parts it isn't a problem of figuring out the best programming truth so much as just being able to focus on the issue and keep all those moving parts in your head. That's tiring so you try to offload as much as you can on another brain

It is lovely when doing exploratory research, less so when in a hurry and you don't want to take the extra mental effort to figure out which of the nerds is right or if one of them is talking out of left field

As opposed to wondering if the llm is hallucinating?

You have to expend a mental effort to think about your solutions anyway; I guess it’s pick your poison really.

Thats the issue, people just copy and paste code from llms thinking "yeah, looks fine to me". It might be a skill issue, but personally it takes me a while to understand the code its giving me and even more on how to actually implement it with all the edge cases that might happen.

Before: I’m a lazy developer so I find the best libraries and abstract logic to write the least code and do least maintenance work.

Now: I’m a lazy developer, so I get a glorified autocomplete to write 10x code than what I have the willpower to. Of course, I won’t read all of it.

Is it important if it's ocasionally hallucinating?

It's not like you should blindly throw the code in, you should run it and verify it

The more common the work you're doing the less likely it is to hallucinate, plus you can ask it to stick to whatever arbitrary coding standards you want so it's more readable to you, a rewrite to remove a wrong library takes an extra couple seconds per method/function

Also it's not like Stack Overflow or other non generated resources don't ocasionally hallucinate, it's not weird for the second or third voted answers in SO to be followed by the comment "This doesnt work because XYZ"

That’s why you take a quick glance of the answer, then read the comments. The do a deeper analysis. Take something like 10 sexonds as it seems every real answer I find that’s good is usually just one or two paragraphs.

Yeah I agree- I think the time spent verifying should vary based on the complexity and sensitivity of what you are looking at, but you never really get away from it.

I think my issue with LLMs is moreso aimed at people who wouldn’t have ever done the bare minimum verification anyway.

i've never been as disgusted by a website as by stack overflow so getting rid of that drastically improves joy

hard disagree. the amount of snobbiness and rude closing of threads as power trips was unbearable. I'm glad LLMs learned off them and we are where we are now

I've often heard this often and I don't buy it. Granted some mods could give some more time for users to rewrite but that's all. Users write bad questions or don't look up answers already solving it. It's a skill issue. Regardless trusting an LLM that's confidentiality incorrect a bit too offen is not really a trade up.

If you consider most of the questions may not be actually "new questions" and have answers already, sometimes if it's important enough it's worth actually putting the effort in to understand the problem and solve it yourself. The over dependance that people are developing on LLMs is a little concerning.

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