logoalt Hacker News

forrestthewoodsyesterday at 2:56 AM2 repliesview on HN

> When debugging a vexing problem one has little to lose by using an LLM — but perhaps also little to gain.

This probably doesn't give them enough credit. If you can feed an LLM a list of crash dumps it can do a remarkable job producing both analyses and fixes. And I don't mean just for super obvious crashes. I was most impressed with a deadlock where numerous engineers and tried and failed to understand exactly how to fix it.


Replies

throwdbaawayyesterday at 2:33 PM

After the latest production issue, I have a feeling that opus-4.5 and gpt-5.1-codex-max are perhaps better than me at debugging. Indeed my role was relegated to combing through the logs, finding the abnormal / suspicious ones, and feeding those to the models.

nrhrjrjrjtntbtyesterday at 4:41 AM

LLMs are good where there is a lot of detail but the answer to be found is simple.

This is sort of the opposite of vibe coding, but LLMs are OK at that too.

show 1 reply