Comment on It used to be a library
theneverfox@pawb.social 2 weeks agoEasier 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 2 weeks 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.
theneverfox@pawb.social 2 weeks ago
I’m really not. This was my daily workflow, one day it was working, the next it was not. There were gradual changes before and after as websites locked themselves down to scraping, but there was a specific update to Google’s search, followed by Bing and the sites that repackage it. I switched to using searxng and quant, but neither of them were ever as good
I couldn’t narrow down to the day, but I could probably pin it down to a specific week if I dug through my notes
Tja@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
You said in a previous post you had to “dig through it”. That’s not needed nowadays. It is measurably faster.
theneverfox@pawb.social 2 weeks ago
Not through search though… That free access to all the knowledge of humanity is a shell of what it was
Llms are a tool. A very useful tool. But it’s also a tool that depends on other tools. It could have automated the process I described and gotten to the answer very fast.
Instead, it needs to read through the code. It’s still relatively fast, but it only works up to a point. After a certain level of complexity, it chokes on the problem
Something has been taken from us. And it’s more than just a tool for coding, it was access to primary sources of information on everything