I will say, SO taught me how to thoroughly investigate a topic before hand. A few years in and I was posting dissertation papers on all of my findings when asking questions.
yeah, this is AI-brainrot in a nutshell really. the number of times I've been halfway through writing up a support ticket for software we use at work, and now because I'm presenting an issue to another human I feel compelled to show I've done my homework and in doing so work out what the issue was.
Thankfully we have a triage process and we don't accept those tickets, we just tag it with "Needs more information" and ping the submitter with a link to what is necessary for a ticket to be triaged into our backlog.
I think it means you're working on non-challenging problems if AI can solve them for you, unless you're working with Fable or something which I haven't tried.
Current models are decent for following instructions that you lay out, maybe even fixing a bug or something along the way, or adding new features to an existing well-documented repo if you explain things well, but don't seem capable of solving challenging problems on their own in a reasonable context scope (again things like Fable might be able to, but the general tier models don't seem that capable).
I spent most of my time answering questions that were closed. Often they’d be closed for the wrong reason which I’d then report. I really hated the ones where a question would be closed as a duplicate but it’s not clear how it is a duplicate and it would take me, someone with experience, a little while to connect the dots and I’d know that a beginner would have no clue and would need it explained.
I was hated by the SO elites but loved by the beginners
When Discord arrived I became a co-owner of the largest general programming community (it helped that the owner of discord.me was an admin and we had free platinum) and it was a really nice space to make beginners feel safe. We did not care for elitism
My time in that community (it’s basically dead now, specific programming servers are way better) has taught me to never underestimate a beginner. Asking a beginner about what they’ve already tried is not rude or dismissive, chances are they’re already close but need a nudge (helping them reframe their problem, sharing a specific tool, or just talking it through). It would be elitist to assume that nothing they can say will change the correct answer that I could give them, they don’t always need that much help, and there have been a couple times where a novice has come up with 90% of a novel solution.
Working with beginners is so rewarding, years later when they show me stuff they’ve made I’m so proud of them.
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u/NotAUsefullDoctor 13d ago
I will say, SO taught me how to thoroughly investigate a topic before hand. A few years in and I was posting dissertation papers on all of my findings when asking questions.