this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
1239 points (99.6% liked)

Programmer Humor

34426 readers
905 users here now

Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)

Rules:

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] millie@beehaw.org 4 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

Depending on what it is you're trying to make, it can actually be helpful as one of many components to help get your feet wet. The same way modding games can be a path to learning a lot by fiddling with something that's complete, getting suggestions from an LLM that's been trained on a bunch of relevant tutorials can give you enough context to get started. It will definitely hallucinate, and figuring out when it's full of shit is part of the exercise.

It's like mid-way between rote following tutorials, modding, and asking for help in support channels. It isn't as rigid as the available tutorials, and though it's prone to hallucination and not as knowledgeable as support channel regulars, it's also a lot more patient in many cases and doesn't have its own life that it needs to go live.

Decent learning tool if you're ready to check what it's doing step by step, look for inefficiencies and mistakes, and not blindly believe everything it says. Just copying and pasting while learning nothing and assuming it'll work, though? That's not going to go well at all.