[dm270]

Im working on some website and created some custom menu. Nothing fancy. AI got it done after some tries and I was happy as web development is not my area of expertise. After some time I realized the menu results to scrolling when it shouldn’t and wanted to make the parent container expand. This was impossible as the AI did a rather unusual implementation even for such a limited use case. Best part: my task now is impossible to solve with AI as it doesn’t really get its own code. I resulted to actually just looking into CSS and the docs and realized there is a MUCH simpler way to solve all of my issues.

Turns out sometimes the next guy who has to do maintenance is oneself.

[Terr_]

> Turns out sometimes the next guy who has to do maintenance is oneself.

Over the years I've been well-served by putting lots of comments into tickets like "here's the SQL query I used to check for X" or "an easy local repro of this bug is to disable Y", etc.

It may not always be useful to others... but Future Me tends to be glad of it when a similar issue pops up months later.

[piva00]

On the same boat, I've learnt to leave breadcrumbs for the future quite a long time ago, and it's paid off many, many times.

After it becomes second-nature is really relaxing to know I have left all the context I could muster around, comments in tickets, comments in the code referencing a decision, well-written commit messages for anything a little non-trivial. I learnt that peppering all the "whys" around is just being a good citizen in the codebase, even if only for Future Me.

[dvfjsdhgfv]

Agree completely, while "what" is completely redundant most of the time, a couple of "why"s can be of immense help later, to oneself and others.

[thefz]

> it doesn’t really get its own code

It doesn’t really get its own anything, as it is unable to "get". It's just a probabilistic machine spitting out the next token

[threatofrain]

"Getting things" is a matter of performance, not about the underlying hardware. If I'm an idiot who knows nothing about programming, but every time I slam the keyboard we get good programs, then how useful is it to discuss whether I am in fact empty-headed?

[thefz]

But the discussion here is that it does not output good programs at all.

[threatofrain]

So we might discuss their performance along a gradient and think on their year over year improvement. Current industry performance is of such magnitude that it has persuaded the world to adopt ChatGPT workflows as much as they have. Adjacent to code, one might look to Terry Tao and how he relates to ML workflows in math.

[hitarpetar]

I guess in your arbitrary hypothetical it wouldn't be useful

[CamperBob2]

It's just a probabilistic machine spitting out the next token

As are you and I. Did you have a deeper point to make?

[Kudos]

Hey, I think everyone understands how they work by now and the pedantry isn't helpful.

[BoredPositron]

Its a tale worth repeating because a minuscule percentage of people know or pretend to know how it works. Our view might be a bit skewed here on hackernews but normal people believe llms are thinking machines.

[thefz]

Then if it can't really reason on its own creation how do you expect it to be correct in what it does if it's simply regurgitating code parsed online?

[hitarpetar]

actually I'm not sure everyone does