Comment on It used to be a library
Tja@programming.dev 1 day agoThat was never easy to find, Google was never good at finding tangential hints. And nowadays you can ask a (local, if you want) agent to analyze the whole library and tell you where the library is crashing. Or open a github issue with the framework to have the author, or the community give you the hint. Good luck doing that on sourceforge.
theneverfox@pawb.social 1 day ago
It absolutely used to be, it was a huge part of my workflow. You put in the framework/library and one or two related terms, and it would bring up pages of information. If you dug through that, maybe make the terms more general once or twice, you literally would find some random forum post that gives you exactly what you needed. Usually someone else who solved the problem, but occasionally it was just a little detail in something unrelated. Or sometimes there just really was nothing, now it’s all the time
Hell, you used to be able to paste the error directly with the project name and get that specific error through the stack and line numbers. Now, it just sees an error message and abstractes it into “any error message”. After the first few results, it’ll be random stack errors now also from completely different projects
And I have tried to use a local LLM to dig through results, the problem is the information no longer comes up. Between sites closing themselves off to prevent scraping and Google intentionally demolishing their search capabilities, that entire branch of development skill is just gone
It was a stark change, just around 2 years ago I noticed it happening, and it’s only gotten worse
At this point you really need an AI to read through the source if you don’t want to do it yourself
I guess you could contact the developers, but it’s generally faster to figure it out yourself, so I never got into the habit
Tja@programming.dev 1 day ago
Yeah, digging through that is the opposite of easy…
theneverfox@pawb.social 15 hours ago
Easier than the alternative multiple times over… and these were examples of how powerful it used to be. These were esoteric problems that couldn’t be worked around, either new libraries we were using to do something wired or legacy code we had to interface with
Like I mentioned, normally you could just Google the stack trace and find a discussion on your error immediately. AI is a decent replacement for that at least
Tja@programming.dev 11 hours ago
This was published in 2011: xkcd.com/979/
This was the rule, not the exception. I remember spending a whole afternoon with a PHP error where the error message was in Hebrew. It was bad.
You are seeing the past with rose colored glasses.