Comment on Stack Overflow in freefall: 78 percent drop in number of questions

• cherrari@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I can only speak for myself obviously, and my context here is some very recent and very extensive experience of applying AI to some new software developed internally in the org where I participate. So far, AI eliminated any need for any kind of assistance with understanding and it was definitely not trained on these particular software, obviously. Hard to imagine why I’d ever go to SO to ask questions about this software, even if I could. And if it works so well on such a tiny edge case, I can’t imagine it will do a bad job on something used at scale.

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  • 123@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    If we go by personal experience, we recently had the time of several people wasted troubleshooting an issue for a very well known commercial Java app server. The AI overview hallucinated a fake system property for addressing an issue we had.

    The person that proposed the change neglected to mention they got it from AI until someone noticed the setting did not appear anywhere in the official system properties documented by the vendor. Now their personal reputation is that they should not be trusted and they seem lazy on top of it because they could not use their eyes to read a one page document.

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    • cherrari@feddit.org ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      That’s a very interesting insight. Maybe the amount of hallucination depends on whether the “knowledge” was loaded in form of a prompt vs training data? In the experience I’m talking about there’s no hallucination at all, but there are wrong conclusions and hypotheses sometimes, especially with really tricky bugs. But that’s normal, the really tricky edge cases is probably not something I’d expect to find on SO anyway…

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