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Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

_I_ know that the answer provided by the prompt isn't quite right because I have enough experience …

_I_ know that the answer provided by the prompt isn't quite right because I have enough experience with the Git CLI to know that it wasn't quite right. Someone who doesn't use the Git CLI at all and is relying on an LLM to do it will not know that. There's also no reason for them to search beyond the LLM or use the LLM to go deeper because the answer is "good enough." That's the point of what I'm trying to make. You don't know what you don't know. Trying different paths that might go down dead ends is part of the learning process. LLMs short-circuit that. This is fine if you think that learning isn't valuable in, this case, software development. I think it is. <soapbox> More specifically, I think that this will, in the long term, create a pyramidal economy where engineers like you and I who learned "the old way" will reap most of the rewards while everyone else coming into the industry will fight for scraps. I suppose this is fine if you think that this is just the natural order of things. I do not. …

Original discussionAI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser210 source comments · at import
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NE

ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude all point me to a plethora of sources for most of my questions that I can click through and read. They're also pretty good at both basic and weird git issues for me. Not perfect, but pretty good. Also part of the workflow of using AI is accepting that your initial prompts might not get the right answer. It's important to scan the answer like you did and use intuition to know 'this isn't right', then try again. Just like we learned how to type in good search queries, we'll also learn how to write good prompts. Sands will shift frequently at first, with prompt strategies that worked well yesterday requiring a different strategy tomorrow, but eventually it will stabilize like search query strategies did.

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NE

I definitely agree everything you wrote is plausible. My hope is that the young ones learn to at least click the links that the LLMs cite and figure out where some of the good source materials are (like official documentation). Whether the LLM citations help them discover the good documentation or prevents them from being familiar with it is another question. As is whether most documentation will be LLM generated in the future and what kind of quality that might be in 5-10 years. Right now, formal specs and documentation looks good for the first couple paragraphs and then is garbage.

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NE

> The search I used gave me three [^0] Most of my searches give 20-80 sources. But i tend to use research mode, even to answer basic questions. I lean on the sources a lot.

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