alt Hacker NewsI've had the same issue every time I've tried it. The code I generally work on is embedded C/C++ with in-house libraries where the tools are less than useful as they try to generate non-existant interfaces and generally generate worse code than I'd write by hand. There's a need for correctness and being able to explain the code thus use of those tools is also detrimental to explainability unless I hand-hold it to the point where I'm writing all of the code myself.
Generating function documentation hasn't been that useful either as the doc comments generated offer no insight and often the amount I'd have to write to get it to produce anything of value is more effort than just writing the doc comments myself.
For my personal project in zig they either get lost completely or gives me terrible code (my code isn't _that_ bad!). There seems to be no middle ground here. I've even tried the tools as pair programmers but they often get lost or stuck in loops of repeating the same thing that's already been mentioned (likely falls out of the context window).
When it comes to others using such tools I've had to ask them to stop using it to think as it becomes next to impossible to teach / mentor if they're passing that I say to the LLM or trying to have it perform the work. I'm confident in debugging people when it comes to math / programming but with an LLM between it's just not possible to guess where they went wrong or how to bring them back to the right path as the throught process is lost (or there wasn't one to begin with).
This is not even "vibe coding", I've just never found it generally useful enough to use day-to-day for any task and my primary use of say phind has been to use it as an alternative to qwant when I cannot game the search query well enough to get the search results I'm looking for (i.e I ignore the LLM output and just look at the references).
> I've had the same issue every time I've tried it. The code I generally work on is embedded C/C++ with in-house libraries where the tools are less than useful as they try to generate non-existant interfaces and generally generate worse code than I'd write by hand.
That's because whatever training the model had, it didn't covered anything remotely similar to the codebase you worked on.
We get this issue even with obscure FLOSS libraries.
When we fail to provide context to LLMs, they generate examples by following supperficial queues like coding conventions. In extreme cases, such as code that employs source code generators or templates, LLMs even fill in function bodies that code generators are designed to generate for you. That's because, if LLMs are oblivious to the context, they resort to hallucinate their way into something seemingly coherent. Unless you provide them with context or instruct them not to make up stuff, they will resort to bullshit their way into an example.
What's truly impressive about this is that often times the hallucinated code actually works.
> Generating function documentation hasn't been that useful either as the doc comments generated offer no insight and often the amount I'd have to write to get it to produce anything of value is more effort than just writing the doc comments myself.
Again,this suggest a failure on your side for not providing any context.
If you give it enough context LLMs synthesize and present them almost instantly. If you're prompting a LLM to generate documentation, which boils down to synthesizing what an implementation does and what's their purpose,and the LLM comes up empty, that means you failed to give it anything to work on.
The bulk of your comment screams failure to provide any context. If your code steers far away from what it expects, fails to follow any discernible structure, and doesn't even convey purpose and meaning in little things like naming conventions, you're not giving the LLM anything to work on.