[jrvarela56]

I’d say come back in a few years for a bad take. But this is already a bad take.

A query in a regular search engine can at best perform like an LLM-based provider like Perplexity for simple queries.

If you have to click or browse several results forget it, makes no sense not to use an LLM that provides sources.

[subsection1h]

> If you have to click or browse several results forget it, makes no sense not to use an LLM that provides sources.

I just searched for "What is inherit_errexit?" at Perplexity. Eight sources were provided and none of them were the most authoritative source, which is this page in the Bash manual:

https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/The-Shopt...

Whereas, when I searched for "inherit_errexit" using Google Search, the above page was the sixth result. And when I searched for "inherit_errexit" using DuckDuckGo, the above page was the third result.

I continue to believe that LLMs are favored by people who don't care about developing an understanding of subjects based on the most authoritative source material. These are people who don't read science journals, they don't read technical specifications, they don't read man pages, and they don't read a program's source code before installing the program. These are people who prioritize convenience above all else.

[josefresco]

> I continue to believe that LLMs are favored by people who don't care about developing an understanding of subjects based on the most authoritative source material. These are people who don't read science journals, they don't read technical specifications, they don't read man pages, and they don't read a program's source code before installing the program. These are people who prioritize convenience above all else.

This makes a lot of sense to me. As a young guy in the 90's I was told that some day "everyone will be fluent in computers" and 25 years later it's just not true. 95% of my peers never developed their fluency, and my kids even less so. The same will hold try for AI, it will be what smartphones were to PCs: A dumbed down interface for people who want to USE tech not understand it.

[dijksterhuis]

I've really wanted to write a clickbait blog post article to post on HN [0] with the title "Hackers don't use LLMs". You've pretty succinctly summarised how I feel about the subject with your last paragraph.

[0]: not that I write blog post articles anyway, it's just a fantasy day dream thing that's been running through my head

[dbmnt]

In the last paragraph you describe the overwhelming majority of humanity, seemingly without any sense of irony. What outcome do you expect here?

[jrvarela56]

Why would you even search for that out of the context of the IDE where you're coding or writing documentation? If you're writing bash you'd have all those man pages loaded in context for it to answer questions and generate code properly.

[ziddoap]

>you'd have all those man pages loaded in context for it to answer

Or I can just go to DDG/Google, and be done with it. No need to pre-load my "search engine" with context to get results.

[dijksterhuis]

Not GP.

Alt + Tab > Ctrl + T > Type > Enter > PgDn > Click > PgDn > Alt + Left > Click > PgDn > Alt + Left > Click > PgDn > Alt + Tab > [Another 45-60 minutes coding] > GOTO Start

With these keybinds (plus clicking mouse, yuck) I can read Nx sources of information around a topic.

I'm always looking to read around the topic. I don't stop at the first result. I always want to read multiple sources to (a) confirm that's the standard approach (b) if not, are there other approaches that might be suitable (c) is there anything else that I'm not aware of yet. I don't want the first answer. I want all the answers, then I want to make my own choices about what fits with the codebase that I am writing or the problem domain that I'm working in.

Due to muscle memory, the first four/five steps i can do in like one or two seconds. Sometimes less.

Switching to the browser puts my brain into "absorb new information" mode, which is a different skill to "do what IDE tells me to do". Because, as a software engineer, my job is to learn about the problem domain and come up with appropriate solutions given known constraints -- not to blindly write whatever code I'm first exposed to by my IDE. I don't work in an "IDE context". I work in a "solving problems with software context".

==

So I agree with the GP. A lot of posts I see about people saying "why not just use LLM" seem to be driven by a motivation for convenience. Or, more accurately, unconsidered/blind laziness.

It's okay to be lazy. But be smart lazy. Think and work hard about how to be lazy effectively.

[giantg2]

I like to see multiple ideas or opinions on a subject. LLMs seem to distill the knowledge and opinions in ways that are more winner-take-all, or at most only the top few samples. Even if you prompt for a deeper sampling it seems it seems the quality drops (like resolution reduces for each) and its still based on popularity vs merits for some types of data.