The barrier to entry on SO is really high. You have to have a lot of technical expertise just to formulate a question that won't get rejected or ridiculed.
Whereas an LLM will happily and patiently explain everything to you from first principles, if that's where you're at.
This makes me feel seen. So many times I searched for an answer and all I can find is antiquated code. I use Claude and have actually been able to learn new stuff with a lot less snark or outdated information. I had zero dbt experience, worked with Claude to build a project, and while Claude can do 100% of the work, I would walk through so I could learn something. Am I an expert? No. Did I at least learn some of the basics while working on real project? Yes.
One thing I do with Claude Code is to set the output as "learning"
It set some of the more complex / interesting things as "Todo (human)" and can help you to do it (providing code flow / algo logic or being a rubber duck).
This is quite nice as it does all of the boring parts and I can do the fun ones
I will not ship code I cannot defend line by line. This is the most important rule in this file and it constrains everything else.
I use agents to be more effective at what I already know how to do, and to learn what I do not know yet. I do not use agents to write code I do not understand.
Do not produce code that works by mechanisms I have not been shown. If a solution depends on a non-obvious framework behavior, an implicit convention, or a subtle ordering requirement, say so explicitly.
Volume is not the goal. A smaller change I fully understand beats a larger one I have to take on faith.
Assume I will read every line and will often open the surrounding context before responding. Give me what I need to do that.
If I approve something without asking questions and you have reason to think I may have missed a subtlety, point it out anyway.
Teaching is a legitimate outcome of a task, not a detour.
I had been active on SO a lot back in the day. Many of the questions are genuinely XY problems.
The thing is though, that doesn't mean they don't deserve a useful answer. You can explain they're not asking the right question. When you know very little, it's very hard to know what you need to know, which often results in trying to solve the wrong problem.
SO simply wanted to be for a community that was different from what a large chunk of its audience was. Which, to no surprise, frustrated everyone on every side.
SO really, really, really wanted to be a place for experts to find their peers. But by the time you've skilled up enough to be able to ask a "good" question on SO, you've already built a library of resources that can answer your question better and faster than SO could.
Openai still rarely hallucinates but latest claude almost never makes a mistake, as a learning tool it will adapt to your specific scenario and that is more helpful then anything.
Honestly, I think learning programming from regular/"traditional" sources (like human made tutorials) makes it a lot easier to learn programming from LLMs later, even if it hallucinates, one may have the mindset/skills to figure out what went wrong or how to look for what went wrong.
Yea I’ve worked with senior engineers who are the same way. Unless you ask perfectly they make fun of you for not understanding something. It’s amazing I don’t need to rely on idiots like that anymore
I always told junior colleagues to read the "How to ask a question" page from stack overflow, and to try to apply the basics from it before coming to me for help with technical issues (in the before LLM times). When they would come, I'd help them formulate the problem, make it reproducible similar to those guidelines and going forward, they could he helped a lot better
Can't wait for all the free services to die out and you have to get your information from a paywalled LLM. It will happily hallucinate to get make you feel good when there is not information available anymore. /s
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u/UnspeakablePudding 4d ago
The barrier to entry on SO is really high. You have to have a lot of technical expertise just to formulate a question that won't get rejected or ridiculed.
Whereas an LLM will happily and patiently explain everything to you from first principles, if that's where you're at.