this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2026
20 points (100.0% liked)
Programming
28155 readers
82 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This week, I was talking to someone at work about a topic they know a lot more about. It was a good exchange, I learned a lot. After the meeting, in the span of like half an hour, they sent me ten essay-length LLM outputs.
And it's just genuinely, like, what is the goal here? It's cool that they want to provide additional reading material, but clearly they did not proof-read it, so I could've just asked an LLM myself, if I deemed that helpful.
There is also just no chance in hell that I'm reading ten essays on the topic, especially when they're as poorly written as LLM output generally is. I genuinely took a few minutes to try to skim it and I covered maybe 10% of the text, but learned hardly anything.
I just really don't understand this mindset of "I can generate a lot of text, so I'm being helpful by sending it to you".
We created an AI usage code of conduct at our workplace. One of the golden rules is "Don't make other people's jobs harder."
As an example, we tried getting AI to generate weekly bug reports from analysing the most common crashes and asserts for the week, assigned to the right person with relevant context. It was a great idea, but too often the bug description and even the title required way too much jargon and comprehension to get through, and often the findings weren't quite right anyway, so it was only useful as a marker of "look at this crash please".
These walls of text people share with each other are another great example. If you're going to do that, you really have to ask it to talk as simply and as briefly as possible with no context assumed.
Exactly this! If I am talking to someone who has expertise in an area, I want to know what they think, not what an LLM outputted.