[ljm]

I believe it’s going to become counter productive sooner than anyone might think, and in fairly frustrating ways. I can see a class of programmers trading their affinity with the skill for a structurally unstable crutch.

I was using Perplexity with Claude 3.5 and asked it how I would achieve some task with langchain and it gleefully spat out some code examples and explanations. It turns out they were all completely fabricated (easy to tell because I had the docs open and none of the functions it referred to existed), and when asked to clarify it just replied “yeah this is just how I imagine it would work.”

[FooBarWidget]

One technique to reduce hallucinations is to tell the LLM "don't make things up, if you don't know then say so". Make a habit of saying this for important questions or questions for which you suspect the LLM may not know.

[ljm]

It's hit and miss, for the same reason Google is (and increasingly more so). If you try and search for 'langchaingo' then you might get lucky if you add enough into the query to say you're working with go, but otherwise it'd just see 'langchain'.

Google is pretty much useless for the same reason.

They're not actually more intelligent, they're more stupid, so you have to provide more and more context to get desired results compared to them just doing more exact searching.

Ultimately they just want you to boost their metrics with more searches and by loading more ads with tracking, so intelligently widening results to do that is in their favour.