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Comment by milesvp | Hacker News Reader

Strong disagree here. I've been trying to learn Zig, and I'm thwarted enough by chatgpt giving me outdated information on Zig's unstable API that if I didn't have a strong incentive to learn it for it's cross compiler, I'd likely turn my efforts towards another language. This effect can greatly alter the adoption curve of a new tech, which can leave it dying on the vine.

You're not wrong though, in that Stack Overflow has the exact same problem. The main difference is that with Stack Overflow, there was a bonus in becoming the first expert on the platform, so while it does stifle new tech adoption, it at least encourages new tech content creation, which in turn encourages new tech. Though, I don't know if it's a net positive or negative in aggregate.

I think this problem will likely lessen as training becomes cheaper and faster. But right now, there is really strong incentives to avoid any tech that has had breaking changes in the last 3 years.

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Someone recently put it that it’s the first 10% of adoption that sets the future for a product.

There are people online calling it the “tech adoption cycle” but this is a concept I encountered in a literal Business 101 class. 2.5% of the population are Innovators. 12.5 are early adopters. Then there’s 70% in the middle where most of your cash comes in, and by the time the laggards hit you’re optimizing for cost per unit because you’ve had to drop the price so much due to competition from copycats and from the next new thing.

So by the time 60% of your early adopters are onboard it’s already been decided if you’re on a rocket ship or this is just a burp.

Early adopters have a high tolerance for inconveniences but it’s not infinite. If they bleed enough they will find something else, and then you are DOA.

Products with volatile demand don't necessarily follow.

Crossing the Chasm, by Geoffrey Moore:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm

Having spent the past week deep in cursor, it's amazing for building out a basic web app.. but getting it to a point of productivity takes a while..

Command line install for latest svelte.. nope npx install is now deprecated, have to do it another way.. ok, let's go old school and read the docs.

Great, it's up and running, but nope, Svelte has just hit V5 and the LLM isn't aware of the changes.. ok, do I drop back to 4 on a new code write, or spend the time to get a decent .cursorrules in place to make sure it's using the right version. Ok, that's in, but look tailwind is too new too.. ok, fine let's get that into .cursorrules..

Oh look, daisy has a v5 coming in 15 days, luckily I got in there just in time..

I thought svelte, tailwind and daisy were the one true way nowadays!

I now have a rule in my cursorrules that asks for any errors that I spot in the code (related to wrong versions) results in both the fix and a rule for the cursorrules so it doesn't happen again. That works well.

The unfortunate truth is that the one true way these days is React, and if you're doing anything else you're in for a world of pain.

The actual truth is that you don’t need any of these frameworks at all. Vanilla JS & HTML has come a long way, and LLMs like Claude can build Vanilla JS with no trouble.

So AI does stifle adoption of new tech then?

Both things can be true. I have also been frustrated trying to get LLMs to work with SwiftUI, given that it’s slightly newer, changing frequently, and has lower adoption relative to something like React.

Honestly this is a short term problem. Eventually the models will have larger context windows and will be able to easily browse brand new documentation or example code.

No such thing as one true way with React and the pain is just as bad if not sometimes worse.

Do you choose createreact app / webpack / vite / next.js ?

Do you choose built in react state/contexts, redux, recoil, zustand, jotai state libraries?

Do you do data tables yourself or use the behemoths TanStack, react-table-libray, MUI x-data-grid

What about HTTP requests? Fetch api? axios? rtk-quey?

What about forms and validation? KISS simple, do it yourself? react-hook-form + zod, tanstack form?

Now how do you integrate them all in to your app, managing each edge case for each dependency with their own opinionated way of doing things not quite neatly working with your other dependency but can brute force it to work with some effort and hacks?

I find things like doing basic vanilla JS, or even things like of Svelte or Elm far less pain than React projects i've worked on. Svelte/Elm did require reading the docs not relying on a LLM.

Looking at the react devs in my company, they already live in a world of pain and confusion. So many simple, silly things turn complicated because of it.

But I thought it was a joke, or do people really choose their tech stack based on LLM support?

BTW You can extend cursor out with new knowledge and the svelte community has a config file you can throw at cursor that'll add svelte 5 support.

The deepseek advancements will allow more frequent retraining incorporating updates, it used to likewise take months for the Google index to update: you could tell because they listed how many sites were indexed on the homepage.

Have you considered learning by reading documentation and tutorials, instead of asking the lie generator? I mean, how do you think people learned things before 2023?

What about a library that doesn’t have any documentation or tutorials, like the Soundfont lib for JUCE where the LLM was essentially I had to get a working product?

Where did the LLM get information for the Soundfront lib if there is no documentation, tutorials, answered questions or source code online?

Same place every LLM gets "information" -- plucking random bits from the latent space that are most likely to follow the input context.

Let's dig into this for a second.

Which "Soundfont lib for JUCE" are you talking about? How did you find it in the first place? Why did you decide to use it if there was no documentation? How did you know it was appropriate or capable for your use case? How did you know it was mature, stable, or safe? Did you read the headers for the library? Did they have comments? Did you read the technical specification for the Soundfont format to understand how it modeled sample libraries?

I work in this stuff all the time, and I'm so very puzzled by what you're even suggesting here.

I Googled and got:

https://www.mucoder.net/blog/2016/03/24/sfzero.html

There was boilerplate that wasn’t explained and only existed in a demo for an audio plugin.

I prompted the LLM with the header files and sections of the demo app and after a few back and forth learning sessions I was getting piano samples playing back:

https://github.com/williamcotton/midiplayer

It works, it doesn’t have any memory issues (after I fixed an issue in the module), and is performant.

This is also my first C++ project!

Thanks for answering!

Assuming your original question was not rhetorical and was asked in good faith, other people who've used SFZero before the advent of LLM's made sure they understood juce::Synthesizer (despite its many warts, juce's public interfaces are well documented and represent a strong point) as this just defines a specific implementation, and either referenced the provided example or read the headers, which are pretty straightforward.

It's great that the LLM was able to get you to where you wanted to be, and congratulations on getting your project to that milestone. Especially for not having worked in C++ before! But to the point of the person you were responding to, the LLM was not fulfilling a generally unmet need. Everything a professional or practiced amateur needs was there already.

> > learning by reading documentation and tutorials

> But to the point of the person you were responding to, the LLM was not fulfilling a generally unmet need. Everything a professional or practiced amateur needs was there already.

But isn't this stretching the definitions of documentation and tutorials a little bit here? A demo app and a bunch of undocumented header files became documentation and tutorials with the assistance of an LLM.

Perhaps.

As an experienced audio developer, it's a distinction without a difference. We get used to reading code and deciphering how to use or improve it (wait until you start working with other's DSP code!), and some features and conventions of C/C++, like the segregation of declarations from definitions, make it especially self-documenting for those that are fluent in it.

Having integrated SFZero myself (albeit to a deadend; it's very middling-to-poor), I was surprised to discover that there was not more explicit documentation when you announced it as the library you were referring to, specifically because I remember the work of integrating it was relatively trivial (maybe half a day or so).

For a complete outsider to audio development, JUCE, C++, of course the LLM helped you get done what you needed to get done, far faster than you could have hoped otherwise. And that's great if you're just toying around. On the other hand, you absolutely would have sharpened your skills with all three of those things more had you the luxury to muddle through and force yourself to make sense of it all yourself.

Assuming skills development is your goal (otherwise, you should be using different tools here! C++ and JUCE are not where to start if your personal goal is music making, synthesis, or MIDI), there's a balancing act between making sure you don't get discouraged and committing to the hard work of learning things in-depth. The LLM gave you a way to avoid feeling stuck and discouraged, and perhaps represents the difference between you sticking with the project or just throwing your hands up. But keep in mind the tradeoff that it implies for skill development and consider only turning to it when the frustration starts to get too high to bear.

The way I use LLMs is as a learning tool. Sure, it can get me unstuck when I add some error messages to the context, but I always take the time to have it explain things, e.g. the reference counted memory model of some of the classes in JUCE. I prompt for a personalized tutorial with the specific problem I'm working on as the subject matter.

I'm also a C programmer and Max/MSP user so this syntactical stuff is mainly just different ways of managing the stack and the heap while turning MIDI into sounds!

  > What about a library that doesn’t have any documentation or tutorials

This always sucks, but since it is something you have to deal with, the answer is "read the code." Hopefully the code has some test cases somewhere, and that is the best place to start. But if not, you unfortunately got to profile and trace the code yourself. It takes awhile, but you usually come out with a pretty good understanding (after A LOT of confusion) and can usually find some good things to fix.

How do you profile and trace it? A debugger is actually one of your best friends here. But this is also what things like cscope and tags (ctags) are for. I suggest becoming familiar with grep, find, sed, and awk as these will also greatly help. I strongly suggest also grabbing a pen and paper. You'll want to draw diagrams. It sucks, but it gets easier over time.

I'll also say that having to do this shitty task drills into you the importance of writing documentation, comments, and writing concise functions in your code. Only a psychopath could go through this trouble and think "fuck it, the next guy can do it too." Unfortunately there's lots of psychopaths lol. Remember, usually "the next guy" is you. You when you forget everything 6 months and 3 projects later. So document and comment while you trace. If your boss tells you not to worry, he's a psychopath too. Just wasting company money making it harder to onboard new employees. And in the worst/best case? Your documentation/commenting just makes the LLM better and more accurate. So there's really no good reason to not doc/comment other than excuses about moving fast. But remember, even though there's never time to do it right, there's always time to do it twice (when you fix what's wrong). And all this work reduces the tech debt and time everyone spends debugging. You have to invest in your work.

Yeah dude, I’ve got a wife, two young children and a full-time job in legal services. These are the side projects that LLMs give me the time and cognitive energies to work on.

Congratulations on having so much free time!

I do lot of data analysis so I am pretty familiar with awk, et. al. But you know, thanks for the condescending lecture, I guess?

I didn't realize it was a rhetorical question. It was not intended to be condescending. There's a lot of people who do not have that skill

Yeah.. it's one thing to say "it would be nice if I could query a LLM about this topic" and another to say "I refuse to study this topic unless I can query a LLM."

To be frank, the latter does not sound like the mindset of an effective engineer -- in my experience effective engineers are curious, voracious in pursuit of knowledge.

Have you considered just walking backwards uphill in the snow to your local library and checking out an (out of date) dead tree book, like - you know like us "real" programmers used to do it?

The gatekeeping around using llms for coding is so goofy (and expected)...

He's giving advice of how to overcome what has been described as a limitation, literally not gatekeeping but opening the gate for the OP.

Instead of imbuing into it some grievance narrative, why shouldn't people take the advice, if LLM's do suffer from an anti-recency bias, to find another way to learn new information that LLM's don't have in their models?

If some source of information you were looking for online wasn't available but it did exist at your local library in a book, why wouldn't you go check out the book?

They don't suffer from recency bias when you dump the docs right into their context.

The lie generator can very efficiently pull the relevant parts of the documentation and tutorials, and it's not that hard to programmatically ask it for a quote and compare it against the actual tutorial.

Have you tried Cursor instead of a chatbot? I don’t trust it to do much coding for me but it has this feature where you give it the URL of the documentation, and it indexes it for you. Then you can reference that documentation in the chat with the @ symbol and Cursor applies RAG to the indexed content to include relevant documentation. I usually index autogenerated API docs and any website docs the library has like guides and tutorials.

The experience is night and day and it’s the only reason I pay for Cursor on top of OpenAI/Anthropic. The answers it gives are much more accurate when including documentation and it helps a lot with exploring APIs. Probably helps a lot with the code generation too, but I don’t use Composer as much.

Yeah, RAG is a great way to handle outdated docs

That's because you're using ChatGPT instead of Claude.

or you could try leraning zig in the old-school way, the way we used to learn before LLMs

who am I kidding? LLMs have changed the game forever. making new computer programming languages is no longer professionally useful, like hand-knitting

I think it will become standard to provide up to date references specifically tailored for LLMS.

For example: https://svelte.dev/docs/llms

Have ChatGPT always use search when you ask questions. I find referencing a version number and requiring search improves things dramatically. Improves does not fix.

v0 for vercel/nextjs

Try phind or other things more into looking stuff up.

Honestly, the shittiness of Google and terrible LLM answers has just made me start reading docs more. In the past few years I think I've become a substantially stronger programmer because of this. So in a way, thanks Google for becoming shit and thanks GPT for being frustrating as hell.

The problem is that sometimes doing things the hard way is the better way. I think learning programming, math, or any tough subject requires struggle. People like these things because it removes a lot of struggle but it more seems like this is a temporary advantage instead of a more long term one. My big concern is how we are becoming more and more addicted to instant gratification, at so many levels. Businesses are valuing quarterly profits above yearly. We've taken "ship early, ship often" to the extreme, as well as "move fast and break things." These are find adages, but like all things have limits. But the world gets more complex and as a result, solving problems becomes harder. You can't get away with first order approximations now and we're just building empires of technical debt. Too big to fail, too entrenched to compete against. But I still think, at some point, we have to say "fuck it, I'm doing things the right way, not the fast way."

Imagine a world without ChatGPT or Stack Overflow. Is it easier to build your Zig project in that world?

The simple answer is no.

However, it's naive to deny that people are driven to technology with large amounts of samples and documentation. When trained on it, LLMs can essentially create infinite, customized versions of these.

LLMs artificially inflate the amount of documentation and samples for older technologies, and many lack the knowledge of newer ones. This creates a feedback loop until the newer technology is included, but the damage has already been done.

That's just a perspective, I don't know that I fully agree with the premise, and certainly don't know a solution. The best solution I can think of is more LLMs that are essentially constantly RAGing from the internet, rather than mostly using pre-trained info. Obviously this part is no longer just the model, but I imagine models could be made to make the RAG process more efficient, or better.

No, but the relative ease of picking up Zig is lower compared to another language that has a lot of training data (maybe golang could be used for similar projects) in the LLM world. So users might be less reluctant to pick up Zig at all now.

That could slow down adoption of new languages, frameworks, libraries etc.

Possibly yes. But this is hard to know and I certainly don't. What I can say is that it would certainly be easier without SEO and that both things you listed tend to exacerbate SEO Hell. SO less so, but it'd be naive to think it is immune. Though not quite to the degree of Reddit. But LLMs tend to reflex the training, so...

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