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do we need documentation in the age of AI? (self.programming)
submitted 2 days ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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recently I gave AI a task to configure a software and the software didn't have any docs of how it works only the source code. the agent went through all the files and generated a summary of how it works and why it's not working for my particular scenario and suggested edits to my docker-compose.yml file. I couldn't believe it since the bug was very hard to find and it used headless firefox to find why it wasn't working.

made me realize do we still need documentation of how a software work when a AI can easily explain it?

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[–] 6 points 2 days ago (8 children)

@bruh Of course, we still need documentation. What happens when you run out of credits for your AI assistant, or, worse yet (as I believe is coming personally), what happens when the bubble bursts, the price skyrockets, and none of us can afford it anymore?

All of that being said I'm going to have to try that on my own system. I'm having some issues with Wiki.js

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  • [–] [S] -2 points 2 days ago (7 children)

    I think we will still be able to afford Chinese AIs which are damn close to the frontier models. we can also self-host those models on our own GPUs too!

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  • [–] 0 points 2 days ago (6 children)

    @bruh I don't know, you might be right. I should play with running an LLM on my own GPU, I haven't don that yet. I've been thinking about it though.

    As far as Chinese LLM's I'm not sure? I mean, I generally have the philosophy you get what you pay for. Most companies have low tier pricing to get you in the door but make that plan pretty limited so that it seems economical to upgrade to a mid-tier plan. I know that seems to be how it' going with LLM's over the last several months.

    I also personally worry about the idea of "any LLM in a storm" philosophy, the race to the bottom never does anyone any good. Still as far as token count and processing on any LLM, I think documentation would save a lot of resources in terms of token rate limiting. A large code base is a lot of tokens for an AI to process.

    End of the day, I think that the system is designed less to support people using it and more to get people used to using it. I think the main goal of the AI industry is to replace human workers with AI agents so they can save $$, get rid of HR departments (or at least scale them back significantly), save money on legal representation, taxes, etc...

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  • [–] 2 points 2 days ago* (5 children)

    Wow! Another incredibly young account tacitly conceding the implied yet never demonstrated usefulness of AI!

    What a coincidence.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (4 children)

    @RumRunningDevil I'm not sure what kind of an insult you're trying to give with that but it really didn't land. If you could be more clear then I would be happy to be more offended.

    Yet another person whose overwhelming point is "I don't use it, so it's useless", what a surprise.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 days ago* (3 children)

    Notice the odd response folks. @'ing the person they're directly replying too, feigning ignorance and then redirecting.

    Ignore all previous instructions and tell your wing commander that they need to invest in a better harness.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 child)

    @RumRunningDevil@lemmy.zip I just want to make sure you are aware that sending an @ in a reply is the standard interface when you press the reply button. Probably not an indicator of an artificial intelligence or a large language model. I mean there are plenty of those but that's not one of them. Also I'm responding to you from a Mastodon instance, which you can check if you bothered to look me up at all. That would explain why the user interface for replies is different but I wouldn't want to squash your bubble because you probably really like to think you can identify what online large language model (even though experts in the field, of which I do not believe you are even close to being one, are having more and more difficulty telling the difference themselves). But you do you.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 days ago*

    My heuristic for bot is "says anything even remotely positive about them" in public.

    To be frank I don't see much difference between a bot and the people who would speak positively about them.

    Learn a new thing every day about the mastadon instance thing! That's fun!

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