alt Hacker NewsI spent the last 14 days chasing an issue with a Spark transform. Gemini and Claude were exceptionally good at giving me answers that looked perfectly reasonable: none of them worked, they were almost always completely off-road.
Eventually I tried with something else, and found a question on stackoverflow, luckily with an answer. That was the game changer and eventually I was able to find the right doc in the Spark (actually Iceberg) website that gave me the final fix.
This is to say that LLMs might be more friendly. But losing SO means that we're getting an idiot friendly guy with a lot of credible but wrong answers in place of a grumpy and possibly toxic guy which, however, actually answered our questions.
Not sure why someone is thinking this is a good thing.
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There are so many "great" answers on StackOverflow. Giving the why and not just the answer.
It's flat wrong to suggest SO had the right answer all the time, and in fact in my experience for trickier work it was often wrong or missing entirely.
LLMs have a better hit rate with me.
I'm hoping increasing we'll see agents helping with this sort of issue. I would like an agent that would do things like pull the spark repo into the working area and consult the source code/cross reference against what you're trying to do.
Once technique I've used successfully is to do this 'manually' to ensure codex/Claude code can grep around the libraries I'm using
You still get the same thing though?
That grumpy guy is using an LLM and debugging with it. Solves the problem. AI provider fine tunes their model with this. You now have his input baked into it's response.
How you think these things work? It's either a human direct input it's remembering or a RL enviroment made by a human to solve the problem you are working on.
Nothing in it is "made up" it's just a resolution problem which will only get better over time.
Because what you’re describing is the exception. Almost always with LLM’s I get a better solution, or helpful pointer in the direction of a solution, and I get it much faster. I honestly don’t understand anyone could prefer Google/SO, and in fact that the numbers show that they don’t. You’re in an extreme minority.
> But losing SO means that we're getting an idiot friendly guy with a lot of credible but wrong answers in place of a grumpy and possibly toxic guy which, however, actually answered our questions.
Which by the way is incredibly ironic to read on the internet after like fifteen years of annoying people left and right about toxic this and toxic that.
Extreme example: Linus Torvalds used to be notoriously toxic.
Would you still defend your position if the “grumpy” guy answered in Linus’ style?
Q&A isn't going away. There's still GitHub Discussions.
What I always appreciate about SO is the dialogue between commenters. LLMs give one answer, or bullet points around a theme, or just dump a load of code in your IDE. SO gives a debate, in which the finer points of an issue are thrashed out, with the best answers (by and large) floating to the top.
SO, at its best, is numerous highly-experienced and intelligent humans trying to demonstrate how clever they are. A bit like HN, you learn from watching the back and forth. I don't think this is something that LLMs can ever replicate. They don't have the egos and they certainly don't have the experience.
Whatever people's gripes about the site, I learned a hell of a lot from it. I still find solutions there, and think a world without it would be worse.