LLMs now slot in first or second, typically completely eliminating SO. Others still provide value.
sonderotis · 5h ago
Woah so I bet you are an LLM power user
GianFabien · 4h ago
There are several dimensions to your question. I can only touch upon a few that immediately come to mind.
The easiest and quickest is to throw up your hands, give up and do something else. I suspect your question doesn't expect that option, but it usually is an option.
Why not AI? If what you are working with has been around for a while and is widely used, then with a bit of careful context setting AI beats searching by other means. AI is only as useful as the information that was scrapped from numerous sources correlates to your context and question.
You could raise a support ticket with the product and hope that somebody can solve your problem.. In my experience this can be rather fruitful or futile yelling into the void.
Then you could attempt to solve your problem by going about it in a different way. This requires backing up and trying different directions. It is always possible that the way you are trying to solve a problem is an edge case that the original designers / implementers didn't anticipate.
If you are really determined, then you have the option of digging into the code, determining how it works, etc. This can be a very deep dive into a rabbit hole. At the bottom of the rabbit hole you will have studied and understood stuff you didn't even know existed and grappling with disassembled machine code. Going this deep is rare but not unheard of.
alganet · 5h ago
Can you be more specific?
sonderotis · 5h ago
Lets say you have a bug and you are trying to resolve it. Lets say react-router which is poorely documented or better yet passportjs
alganet · 5h ago
Open a ticket to react-router or passportjs, explaining the issue in careful detail, explaining what is the problem in clear english, and which steps you already took to try to solve it (even if the steps sound dumb or waste of time).
LLMs now slot in first or second, typically completely eliminating SO. Others still provide value.
The easiest and quickest is to throw up your hands, give up and do something else. I suspect your question doesn't expect that option, but it usually is an option.
Why not AI? If what you are working with has been around for a while and is widely used, then with a bit of careful context setting AI beats searching by other means. AI is only as useful as the information that was scrapped from numerous sources correlates to your context and question.
You could raise a support ticket with the product and hope that somebody can solve your problem.. In my experience this can be rather fruitful or futile yelling into the void.
Then you could attempt to solve your problem by going about it in a different way. This requires backing up and trying different directions. It is always possible that the way you are trying to solve a problem is an edge case that the original designers / implementers didn't anticipate.
If you are really determined, then you have the option of digging into the code, determining how it works, etc. This can be a very deep dive into a rabbit hole. At the bottom of the rabbit hole you will have studied and understood stuff you didn't even know existed and grappling with disassembled machine code. Going this deep is rare but not unheard of.