Comment by pagutierrezn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pagutierrezn | Hacker News Reader

AI is filling "narrow" gaps. In the case of seniors these are:

-techs they understand but still not master. AI aids with implementation details only experts knowb about

- No time for long coding tasks. It aids with fast implementations and automatic tests.

- No time for learning techs that adress well understood problems. Ai helps with quick intros, fast demos and solver of learners' misunderstandings

In essence, in seniors it impacts productivity

In the case of juniors AI fills the gaps too. But these are different from seniors' and AI does not excell in them because gaps are wider and broader

- Understand the problems of the business domain. AI helps but not that much.

- Understand how the organization works. AI is not very helpful here.

- Learn the techs to be used. AI helps but it doesn't know how to guide a junior in a specific organisational context and specific business domain.

In essence it helps, but not that much because the gaps are wider and more difficult to fill

In my experience AI is wikipedia/stackoverflow on steroids when I need to know something about a field I dont know much about. It has nice explanations and you can ask for examples or scenarios and it will tell you what you didnt understand.

Only when you know about the basic notions in the field you want to work with AI can be productive. This is not only valid for coding but also for other fields in science and humanities.

Except stackoverflow was only occasionally hallucinating entire libraries.

Perhaps asking the machine to do your job for you isn’t as effective asking the machine to help you think like a senior and find the information you need to do the job yourself.

When you ask it for information and it just makes it up (like I just described), how is that helping the senior?

I’ve literally asked for details about libraries I know exist by name, and had every llm I’ve tried (Claude, Gemini Pro, ChatGPT) just make shit up that sounded about right, but was actually just-wrong-enough-to-lead-me-on-a-useless-rabbit-hole-search.

At least most people on stackoverflow saying that kind of thing were somewhat obviously kind of dumb or didn’t know what they were doing.

Like function calls with wrong args (or spelled slightly differently), capitalization being wrong (but one of the ‘okay’ ways), wrong paths and includes.

I have been burned so many times asking LLMs about whether some tool/app/webapp has a feature, if so where I can find or enable or disable it, etc. The number of "just plausible enough to believe" hallucinations I've got back as answers is absolutely maddening.

I've lost count of how many times I've asked whether some command line tool has an option or config available for some niche case and ChatGPT or Gemini shouts "Yes! Absolutely! just use '--use-external-mode' to get the behavior you want, it's that simple!" and it's 100% hallucination created by mangling together my intent with a real option in the docs but which in reality does not actually exist nor has it ever existed. It's even worse with GUI/menu navigation questions I'm guessing because it's even less grounded by text-based docs and trivially easy to bullshit that an option is buried in Preferences, the External tab maybe, somewhere, probably.

The desperate personality tuning to please the user at all costs combined with LLMs inherently fuzzy averaging of reality produces negative value whenever I truly need a binary yes/no "Does X exist in Y or not?" answer to a technical question. Then I waste a bunch of time falling back to Google trying to definitively prove or disprove whether "--use-external-mode" is a real thing and sure enough, it's not.

It does occasionally lead to hilariously absurd exchanges where when challenged instead of admitting its mistake the LLM goes on to invent an elaborate entirely fabricated backstory about the implementation of the "--use-external-mode" command to explain why despite appearing to not exist, it actually does but due to conflicts with X and Y it isn't supported on my environment, etc, etc.

I use Claude Code, Roo Code, Codex and Gemini CLI constantly so I'm no kneejerk LLM hater to be clear. But for all the talk about being "a better version of Google" I have had so much of my time wasted by sending me down endless rabbit holes where I ignored my sneaking suspicion I was being lied to because the answer sounded just so plausibly perfect. I've had the most success by far as a code generation tool vs. a Google replacement.

>ChatGPT or Gemini shouts "Yes! Absolutely! just use '--use-external-mode' to get the behavior you want, it's that simple!" and it's 100% hallucination created by mangling together my intent with a real option in the docs but which in reality does not actually exist nor has it ever existed

Yeah I've had that one a lot. Or, it's a real option that exists in a different, but similar product, but not in this one.

If we're just back to I do the work and use a search engine, why futz with AI?

If the free market is any indication, because it’s more effective than what passes for a search engine these days.

It's not, but there's sure a lot of money and pride riding on getting people to believe it is

16.4 billion google searches per day vs 2.6 billion consumer chatgpt prompts and another 2.6 billion claude prompts. Maybe it’s apples and oranges but google has been a verb for nearly twenty years (oxford added it as a verb for web search in 2006).

As opposed to SO always somehow ending up giving an answer where boost or jQuery was the top answer.

I've been really caught out a few times when ChatGPT's knowledge is flawed. It gets a lot of stuff about DuckDB deeply wrong. Maybe it's just out of date, but it repeatedly claims that DuckDB doesn't enforce any constraints, for instance..

Well it's not stackoverflow on steroids, otherwise it'd give you a surly "why do you want to do that?" response and then delete your question.

Man I don't miss that place or those people. Glad AI's basically destroyed it.

Feels like we're seeing AI accelerate those who already know where they're going, while leaving the early-stage learners still needing the same human guidance they always did.

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