I wrote multiple answers to questions that weren't just "point to docs". And even when it is pointing to docs you are providing the reasoning as to why it works one way or another.
Ever since the AI stuff started rolling around on coding i've seen MORE documentation, theres a big incentive to properly document your API endpoints so LLMs can figure it out from specs, and even when not documented the llms can also just read the code and figure it out directly (for libraries and similar). And at least in my experience they tend to document or write it down for future sessions too!
Yeah, sorry, I guess I should be clearer that I'm rather sarcastic. My sad experience unfortunately shows that people less docs (or the docs are now hallucinated AI slop) instead of writing more of them.
on the contrary, theres more of an incentive for apis to have docs for agent discovery. the docs / interfaces themselves can be auto-gened (stainless / mintlify)
I had email correspondence once with a vendor about how to talk to their i2c bus. The documentation was all asm, and I wanted to at least “uplift” to C. They didn’t have any answers, so I sent them my solution which was was the asm calls that the c stdlib decompiled into.
4 years later my company had bought a different company, who happened to be using a newer model of the same board. They asked me how we could use the 12c bus. “Well before you bought us, we emailed the vendor and sent back this C snippet”
It was my code, verbatim. I’ve always wondered how many times they passed that bit of code around.
Claude does it quite a bit when you’re triggering the search tool functions.
It’s fine, and what you would expect for certain prompts, except that the synthesized results often come back communicating more authority than they deserve.
It was funny for me, when I asked it about something specific exotic - and it gave me a confident answer. But checking the sources I discovered it was from my own inquiries on a forum thread about it from the last time I unsuccesfully tried this (before the agents came) And so I knew, that any authorative tone was undeserved.
On the other hand, Claude later nailed this project, where I as a human said before, no, too much extra work.
One thinking is most people writing software who are not software engineers prefer using AI because they don't think software is valuable in itself, it's only a way to solve a problem. So there are two camps, the other being people who like to solve "software problems". But this latter has been solved by AI
That's exactly thing I'm trying to call out. AI coding has attracted a flood of people whose only goal is to make a quick buck out of shoddy work. They regard science and engineering as beneath them, and they're not shy about saying it, here and elsewhere.
Any serious professional in this field knows that software development is far from a solved problem. It wasn't before LLMs, and it isn't now. Responsible development takes discipline and respect for the hard-won lessons of past and present efforts.
But no, according to many here, being responsible makes you a "luddite." "Humans make mistakes too," that's what they'll say as they'll inevitably screw over people's lives with their reckless disregard for others. "It's not my issue to solve."
Seriously, haven't techbros already caused enough damage throughout society with "move fast and break things"? A lot of people are losing patience for this nonsense.
OCaml has a lot of other cons though that Rust doesn't have. I would definitely pick Rust over OCaml even for projects that can tolerate a runtime with GC pauses. (And clearly most people agree.)
The ecosystem. The language is lovely, but dune/opam is not up to the standard of the Go or Rust build systems, and the set of useful libraries is somewhat skewed. Whenever I write a program in Caml, I gain an hour thanks to the nice language, and then lose two fighting with dune/opam.
There's also the support for concurrency and parallelism, which has started to improve recently, but is still years behind what is available in Go (but still better in my opinion than what is available in Rust).
For example, multicore OCaml is not free of race conditions.
The GC, while super efficient (pauses are in the milliseconds), is not suitable for hard realtime.
Still, where absolute max performance or realtime are not required, I'd choose OCaml as it is elegant & a pleasure to code in (personal opinion, ymmv).
Poor windows support, confusing and buggy tooling (yeah really), mediocre documentation, global type inference, weird obsession with linked lists leading to performance gotchas, difficult syntax (yeah really), small community.
I can expand on any of those if you disagree with them.
But good data structure is not always evident from the get go. And if your types are too specific it would make future development hard if the specs change. This is what I struggle with
Professionally I'm a data architect. Modeling data in a way that is functional, performant and forward facing is not an easy problem so it's perfectly fine to struggle with it. We do our best job with what we've got within reasonable constraints - we can't do anything more than that.
I found that over time my senses have been honed to more quickly identify things that are important to deeply study and plan right now and areas where I can skimp more and fix it later if problems develop. I don't know if there was a short cut to honing those senses that didn't involve a lot of pain as I needed to pick apart and rework oversights.
Good strong (read specific) types encourage easier redactors.
Changing the function signature or the type then generated cascade of compiler errors that tells you exactly what you touched.
Weak non specific types does not have that property and even with tests you cannot be sure about the change and cannot even be sure you are upholding invariants
I have started using chatgpt for everything from financial planning to holiday planning to product purchase. Whenever I think I hit something useful I add it to memory. I'm a "go" plan user because they had a promotional offer that gave me free access to the plan for a year. Will I continue after one year? Truth is nothing I have in chatgpt cannot be recreated elsewhere. But if I care about keeping those memories I might. I think the real challenge for me now is finding back out conversations, it seems their history search is quite bad.
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