> for only about five minutes of LLM query or web search
I think I have more trust in the PG defaults that in the output of a LLM or copy pasting some configuration I might not really understand ...
I think I have more trust in the PG defaults that in the output of a LLM or copy pasting some configuration I might not really understand ...
Uh, yea... why would you? Do you do that for configurations you found that weren't from LLMs? I didn't think so.
I see takes like this all the time and I'm really just mind-boggled by it.
There are more than just the "prompt it and use what it gives me" use cases with the LLMs. You don't have to be that rigid. They're incredible learning and teaching tools. I'd argue that the single best use case for these things is as a research and learning tool for those who are curious.
Quite often I will query Claude about things I don't know and it will tell me things. Then I will dig deeper into those things myself. Then I will query further. Then I will ask it details where I'm curious. I won't blindly follow or trust it like I wouldn't a professor or anyone or any thing else, for that matter. Just like I would when querying a human for or the internet in general for information, I'll verify.
You don't have to trust it's code, or it's configurations. But you can sure learn a lot from them, particularly when you know how to ask the right questions. Which, hold onto your chairs, only takes some experience and language skills.
If you have 5 minutes then you can't as you say :
> Then I will dig deeper into those things myself ...
So my point is I don't care if it's coming from LLM or a random blog, you won't have time to know if it's really working (ideally you would want to benchmark the change).
If you can't invest the time better to stay with the defaults, which in most project the maintainers spent quite a bit of time to make sensible.
I happen to have a good bit of experience with PostgreSQL, so that colored the "5 minutes" part of it. Still, most of the time, you "have" more than 5 minutes to create the orchestrator's deployment config for the service (which never exists by default on any k8s-based orchestrator). I'm simply saying to not be negligent of the service's own config, even though a default exists.
I've asked ChatGPT to summarize Go build constraints, especially in the context of CPU microarchitectures (e.g. mapping "amd64.v2" to GOARCH=amd64 GOAMD64=v2). It repeatedly smashed its head on GORISCV64, claiming all sorts of nonsense such as v1, v2; then G, IMAFD, Zicsr; only arriving at rva20u64 et al under hand-holding. Similar nonsense for GOARM64 and GOWASM. It was all right there in e.g. the docs for [cmd/go].
This is the future of computer engineering. Brace yourselves.
Remember, an LLM is a JPG of all the text of the internet.
Isn't that the whole point, to ask it specific tidbits of information? Are we to ask it large, generic pontifications and claim success when we get large, generic pontifications back?
The narrative around these things changes weekly.
You might think of it as a cache, worth checking first for speed reasons.
The big downside is not that they sometimes fail, its that they give zero indication when they do.
You can see if it's used search in the interface, which helps evaluate how likely it is to get the right answer.
Stay brief. Do not use emoji.
Check primary sources, avoid speculation.
Do not suggest next steps.
Don't ask LLMs that are trained on a whole bunch of different versions of things with different flags and options and parameters where a bunch of people who have no idea what they're doing have asked and answered stackoverflow questions that are likely out of date or wrong in the first place how to do things with that thing without providing the docs for the version you're working with. _Especially_ if it's the newest version, regardless if it's cutoff date was after that version was released - you have no way to know if it was _included_. (Especially about something related to a programming language with ~2% market share)
The contexts are so big now - feed it the docs. Just copy paste the whole damn thing into it when you prompt it.
You can put the relevant docs in your prompt, add them to a workspace/project, deploy a docs-focused MCP server, or even fine-tune a model for a specific tool or ecosystem.
> You can put the relevant docs in your prompt
I've done a lot of experimenting with these various options for how to get the LLM to reference docs. IMO it's almost always best to include in prompt where appropriate.
For a UI lib that I use that's rather new, specifically there's a new version that the LLMs aren't aware of yet, I had the LLM write me a quick python script that just crawls the docs site for the lib and feeds the entire page content back into itself with a prompt describing what it's supposed to do (basically telling it to generate a .md document with the specifics about that thing, whether it's a component or whatever, ie: properties, variants, etc in an extremely brief manner) as well as build an 'index.md' that includes a short paragraph about what the library is and a list of each component/page document that is generated. So in about 60 seconds it spits out a directory full of .md files and I then tell my project-specific LLM (ie: Claude Code or Opencode within the project) to review those files with the intention of updating the CLAUDE.md in the project to instruct that any time we're building UI elements we should refer to the index.md for the library to understand what components are available and when appropriate to use one of them we _must_ review the correlating document first.
Works very very very well. Much better than an MCP server specifically built for that same lib. (Huge waste of tokens, LLM doesn't always use it, etc) Well enough that I just copy/paste this directory of docs into my active projects using that library - if I wasn't lazy I'd package it up but too busy building stuff.
Where's that productivity increase everyone's been talking about?
That's what you'd do by hand if you were optimizing, so save some time and point Claude Code or Codex CLI or GitHub Copilot at it and see what happens.
They charge per token, everyone charges per token.
I run a pricing calculator here - for 50,000 input tokens, 5,000 output tokens (which I estimate would be about right for a PostgreSQL optimization loop) GPT-5 would cost 11.25 cents: https://www.llm-prices.com/#it=50000&ot=5000&ic=1.25&oc=10
I use Codex CLI with my $20/month ChatGPT account and so far I've not hit the limit with it despite running things like this multiple times a day.
If that is true in some months there will be no dba jobs.
Funny that at the same time SQL is one of the most requested languages in job postings.
Knowing how to "run an agentic loop to optimize the config file" is meaningless techno-jabber to 99.99% of the world's population.
I am entirely unconcerned for my future career prospects.
I don't think end users want to "optimize their PostgreSQL servers" even if they DID know that's a thing they can do. They want to hire experts who know how to make "that tech stuff" work.
Saying that anybody can learn to unblock a sink by watching youtube is your tipical HN mentality of stating opinons as facts.
You can't become a db expert with a promt.
I hope you make a lot of money with your lies and good luck.
These days you can replace those books and forums with a top tier LLM, but you still need to put in the practice yourself. Even with AI assistance that's still a lot of work.
You can replace books with your own time and research.
Again making statements that are just not true. Typical HN behavior.
As far as I know in the field of logic the one making a statement, in this case you, is the one who has to prove it.
But in this case you make a statemen and then ask ME to prove it wrong? Makes zero fucking sense.
As much as you don't apreciate it, that is how debate and logic works.
You buy a non-fiction book to learn something, or to act as a reference.
An LLM provides an alternative mechanism for learning that thing, or looking up those reference points.
What am I missing here?
Do you think a search engine could replace a book?
It is so self evident true that you don't even need to reason about it.
That LLMs can replace a book is a fundamental truth of the universe like the euclid postulates or like 1=1.
Well then there is no way to continue the conversation, because by definition axioms can't be false.
I don't understand what you mean. Are you saying that it's not true that anyone could learn to unblock a sink by watching YouTube videos?
Is not that hard to understan mate. Maybe put my comment in the LLM so you can get it.
What is your point again?
If you don't like the sink analogy what analogy would you use instead for this? I'm confident there's a "people could learn X from YouTube but chose to pay someone else instead" that's more effective than the sink one.
It does make people FEEL more productive.
There are thousands (probably millions) of us walking around with anecdotal personal evidence at this point.
If the personal opinions on this site were true, half of the code in the world would be functional, lisp would be one of the languages most used and Microsoft would have not bougth DropBox.
I really think HN hive minds opinions means nothing. Too much money here to be real.
I hardly remember anyone on HN, a tech audience, saying they used blockchain everyday. Why don't you go find some of that evidence?
Just like Mr Meeseeks, it’s only a matter of time before it realizes that deleting all the data will make the DB lightning fast.