Perhaps asking the machine to do your job for you isn’t as effective asking the machine to help you think like a senior and find the information you need to do the job yourself.
When you ask it for information and it just makes it up (like I just described), how is that helping the senior?
I’ve literally asked for details about libraries I know exist by name, and had every llm I’ve tried (Claude, Gemini Pro, ChatGPT) just make shit up that sounded about right, but was actually just-wrong-enough-to-lead-me-on-a-useless-rabbit-hole-search.
At least most people on stackoverflow saying that kind of thing were somewhat obviously kind of dumb or didn’t know what they were doing.
Like function calls with wrong args (or spelled slightly differently), capitalization being wrong (but one of the ‘okay’ ways), wrong paths and includes.
I have been burned so many times asking LLMs about whether some tool/app/webapp has a feature, if so where I can find or enable or disable it, etc. The number of "just plausible enough to believe" hallucinations I've got back as answers is absolutely maddening.
I've lost count of how many times I've asked whether some command line tool has an option or config available for some niche case and ChatGPT or Gemini shouts "Yes! Absolutely! just use '--use-external-mode' to get the behavior you want, it's that simple!" and it's 100% hallucination created by mangling together my intent with a real option in the docs but which in reality does not actually exist nor has it ever existed. It's even worse with GUI/menu navigation questions I'm guessing because it's even less grounded by text-based docs and trivially easy to bullshit that an option is buried in Preferences, the External tab maybe, somewhere, probably.
The desperate personality tuning to please the user at all costs combined with LLMs inherently fuzzy averaging of reality produces negative value whenever I truly need a binary yes/no "Does X exist in Y or not?" answer to a technical question. Then I waste a bunch of time falling back to Google trying to definitively prove or disprove whether "--use-external-mode" is a real thing and sure enough, it's not.
It does occasionally lead to hilariously absurd exchanges where when challenged instead of admitting its mistake the LLM goes on to invent an elaborate entirely fabricated backstory about the implementation of the
"--use-external-mode" command to explain why despite appearing to not exist, it actually does but due to conflicts with X and Y it isn't supported on my environment, etc, etc.
I use Claude Code, Roo Code, Codex and Gemini CLI constantly so I'm no kneejerk LLM hater to be clear. But for all the talk about being "a better version of Google" I have had so much of my time wasted by sending me down endless rabbit holes where I ignored my sneaking suspicion I was being lied to because the answer sounded just so plausibly perfect. I've had the most success by far as a code generation tool vs. a Google replacement.
>ChatGPT or Gemini shouts "Yes! Absolutely! just use '--use-external-mode' to get the behavior you want, it's that simple!" and it's 100% hallucination created by mangling together my intent with a real option in the docs but which in reality does not actually exist nor has it ever existed
Yeah I've had that one a lot. Or, it's a real option that exists in a different, but similar product, but not in this one.
16.4 billion google searches per day vs 2.6 billion consumer chatgpt prompts and another 2.6 billion claude prompts. Maybe it’s apples and oranges but google has been a verb for nearly twenty years (oxford added it as a verb for web search in 2006).
