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A comment on Not So Fast: AI Coding Tools Can Reduce Productivity. Parent comment

Re:Not So Fast: AI Coding Tools Can Reduce Productivity by Tainnor on Friday July 11, 2025 @07:14AM (#44530828)
> I expect the answers of the AI to be really good. If it isn't, having explained my problem to the AI was simply a waste of time.

I find the worst part to be when it doesn't correct flaws in my assumptions.

For example, yesterday I asked it "what is the difference between these two Datadog queries"? And it replied something that was semi-correct, but it didn't discover the fundamental flaw - that the first one wasn't a valid query because of unbalanced parens. In fact, it turns out that the two strings (+ another one) would get concatenated and only then would it be a valid query.

A simple "the first string is not a valid query because of a missing closing paren" would have saved a lot of time in trying to understand this, and I suspect that's what I would have received if I had prompted it with "what's the problem with this query" but LLMs are just too sycophantic to help with these things.

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Re:Not So Fast: AI Coding Tools Can Reduce Productivity by SamPatt on Friday July 11, 2025 @09:49AM (#44532134)
I have found that o3, specifically, will tell me relevant information that I didn't ask for.

But most other models don't.

I do have a custom instruction in place to ask if I'm aware of concepts related to my question - perhaps in coming up with these, it notices when something relevant hasn't been mentioned.

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