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Comment by brookst | Hacker News Reader

Why do programmers search for specific questions rather than always relying on their inherent knowledge?

I’m a crappy hobbyist programmer but for me it is useful to see if someone has implemented exactly what I need, or debugged the problem I’m having. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect programmers or LLMs to know everything about every library’s use in every context just from first principles.

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I do it to save the limited brain power I have before rest or food is required. You could spend 5 minutes writing a sort (at a high level processing) or just use existing code which might take 5 minutes to find but uses less brain power.

This allows you to use that brain power on specific things that need you and let google remember the format of that specific command or let an ai write out your routing file.

The older I get the less I'm bound by time, lack of knowledge or scope but more limited by clarity. Delegate tasks where possible and keep the clarity for the overall project and your position.

But why would that information not be included in the wide crawl already encoded in the model weights before the knowledge cutoff? I believe the article mentions frontier models so we are talking about models trained on trillions of tokens here

Because cutoff can be like few months ago and you still have new versions of libraries being developed every month. API getting deprecated or removed or new API being added. Model need to have access to the latest API or SDK that is available and know e.g. what iOS SDK you have currently available and what MacOS version you have etc. Having access to github issues also help to figure out if there is bug in library.

In addition to cutoff dates, models do not encode every single thing from the training set verbatim. One forum post somewhere about Foo library v13.5.3 being incompatible with Bar 2.3 and resulting in ValueErrors is not going to make it.

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