Comment by 20k | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 20k | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I mean, is it really that hard to find information in the docs?

Like, if I want to find out what, I don't know, "GetQueuedCompletionStatus" does. I google

GetQueuedCompletionStatus

Find this page:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/ioapiset...

Bam, that's the single source of truth right there. Microsoft's docs are pretty great

If I use an LLM, I have to ask it for the documentation about "GetQueuedCompletionStatus". Then I have to double check its output, because LLMs hallaucinate

Doubly checking its output involves googling "GetQueuedCompletionStatus", finding this page:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/ioapiset...

And then reading the docs to validate whether or not what its told me is correct. How does this save me any time?

How about we do the following.

I have not done win32 programming in 12 years. Maybe you've done it more recently. I'll use an LLM and you look up things manually. We can see, who can build a win32 admin UI that shows a realtime view of every open file by process with sorting, filtering and search on both the files and process/command names.

I estimate this will take me 5 minutes Would you like to race?

This mentality is fundamentally why I think AI is not that useful, it completely underscores everything that's wrong with software engineering and what makes a very poor quality senior developer

I'll write an application without AI that has to be maintained for 5 years with an ever evolving featureset, and you can write your own with AI, and see which codebase is easiest to maintain, the most productive to add new features to, and has the fewest bugs and best performance

Sure let's do it. I am pretty confident mine will be more maintainable, because I am an extremely good software engineer, AI is a powerful tool, and I use AI very effectively

I would literally claim that with AI I can work faster and produce higher quality output than any other software engineer who is not using AI. Soon that will be true for all software engineers using AI.

I'm curious, have you ever worked on a single software project for more than 5 years?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com