Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Osmose 762 days ago
Maybe it's just me but if I felt like my application's error messages weren't easy enough to understand I'd try to improve the messages instead of throwing all the context at an AI and hoping for the best.
3 comments

DevTools can't force frameworks and libraries to output better error messages.

But it can help us humans understand them better.

Pretty much all web frameworks are open source. And most web developers are more than capable to improve unfriendly errors upstream.
Framework improvement is ortogonal to AI helping with error messages.

Both can and are coexisting just fine.

People have been trying to get compilers and runtimes to generate better errors for decades, and sites like StackOverflow exist to backfill the fact that this is a really hard problem. If an AI can get you a better explanation synchronously, doesn't that in fact represent an improvement in the "messages"?
No because all the AI is doing is making up statistically plausible sounding nonsense? The best case output is a correct summary of the documentation page - why add a huge amount of power use alongside massive privacy invasion just to deal with that?

I have read and re-read this article and I don’t understand how this is better for any purpose other than “we put AI in something, increase our stock price!”

That sounds like a generic argument against any AI integration, though. "All they do is make up statistically plausible sounding nonsense" is definitionally true, but sorta specious as it turns out that nonsense is often pretty useful. In particular in this case because it gives you a "summary of the documentation page" you'd otherwise have to go look up, something we know empirically is difficult for a lot of otherwise productive folks.
Well yes, most AI integrations are worthless and not just this one.
> No because all the AI is doing is making up statistically plausible sounding nonsense?

Isn’t that just what we humans do with our educated guesses?

No. Humans can have actual domain knowledge plus contextual awareness which leads them to actually understand the subject by means of their education, and thus make guesses based on more than linguistic and syntactic plausibility. Educated guesses can be wrong, but are by definition not merely "plausible sounding nonsense."
Yep. The Web console could just link to some documentation.

The link could even be parameterized so the URLs or other elements related to the error replace placeholders in the doc. But I'm sure a developer is capable of enough abstraction to replace example data themselves.

Agreed! it would be really helpful if the console just showed me some documentation but if google manages to make something similar to github copilot then it could potentially be a game changer.