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simonwtoday at 12:28 PM5 repliesview on HN

> It will never tell you that what you’re building already mostly exists as work that you can build on.

It will if you remember to ask it. I've got into the habit of starting any new project with a session where I ask a search-enabled LLM to help me figure out what the prior art for a problem is. It's saved me quite a bit of time.


Replies

sigbottletoday at 1:06 PM

I really wish there were search harnesses, actually. My LLMs are lazy as hell and seem to want to just report the first thing they find on google. I know they can return truly niche and useful results, but it takes a lot more prompting to get them there than I would like.

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andrewjktoday at 1:02 PM

Isn't the usual argument that all AIs can do is build on prior art? Like, I spend a disproportionate amount of time trying to convince my agents that I don't want to just reimplement the Rust borrow checker for my language!

capitalatrisktoday at 12:41 PM

It seems implicit in the article that the author should have remembered to ask, as part of the prior research.

CuriouslyCtoday at 1:28 PM

This is just another facet of the sycophancy issue. They really need to start RLing these models to gently push back the way a friend would on things that are questionable.

It would also make sense for them to just RL in the "research prior art" arc as part of that "is the request sensible" pre-analysis. It wouldn't be difficult and it would save everyone a lot of pain.

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bryancoxwelltoday at 12:39 PM

Think you could argue that’s more LLM-assisted engineering than it is vibe coding.