>Consider a developer working with a cutting-edge JavaScript framework released just months ago. When they turn to AI coding assistants for help, they find these tools unable to provide meaningful guidance because their training data predates the framework’s release. This forces developers to rely solely on potentially limited official documentation and early adopter experiences, which, for better or worse, tends to be an ‘old’ way of doing things and incentivises them to use something else.
I can't help but feel that a major problem these days is the lack of forums on the Internet, specially for programming. Forums foster and welcome new members, unlike StackOverflow. They're searchable, unlike Discord. Topics develop as people reply, unlike Reddit. You're talking to real people, unlike ChatGPT. You can post questions in them, unlike Github Issues.
When I had an issue with a C++ library, I could often find a forum thread made by someone with a similar problem. Perhaps because there are so many Javascript libraries, creating a separate forum for each one of them didn't make sense, and this is the end result.
I also feel that for documentation, LLMs are just not the answer. It's obvious that we need better tools. Or rather, that we need tools. I feel like before LLMs there simply weren't any universal tools for searching documentation and snippets other than Googling them, but Googling them never felt like the best method, so we jumped from one subpar method to another.
No matter what tool we come up with, it will never have the flexibility and power of just asking another human about it.
I can't help but feel that a major problem these days is the lack of forums on the Internet, specially for programming. Forums foster and welcome new members, unlike StackOverflow. They're searchable, unlike Discord. Topics develop as people reply, unlike Reddit. You're talking to real people, unlike ChatGPT. You can post questions in them, unlike Github Issues.
When I had an issue with a C++ library, I could often find a forum thread made by someone with a similar problem. Perhaps because there are so many Javascript libraries, creating a separate forum for each one of them didn't make sense, and this is the end result.
I also feel that for documentation, LLMs are just not the answer. It's obvious that we need better tools. Or rather, that we need tools. I feel like before LLMs there simply weren't any universal tools for searching documentation and snippets other than Googling them, but Googling them never felt like the best method, so we jumped from one subpar method to another.
No matter what tool we come up with, it will never have the flexibility and power of just asking another human about it.