Il generatore automatico di tutorial è forse il miglior esempio di "vibe coding"

<p>Quick question: how did you learn to code? It probably *wasn’t* bribing someone a year or two ahead of you in CS to finish all your homework, but that’s exactly what ‘vibe coders’ are doing — even in class. Odds are, you learned by working through exercises, following tutorials, and doing it yourself. Finding good tutorials isn’t getting any easier in the age of LLMs, and that’s where [Deven Jarvis]’s Lathe comes in: it’s a project to get an LLM to make the tutorial for you. Instead of doing the work for you, it gets the clanker to show you how to do it yourself.</p><p>Everyone’s different, so this may not apply to you, but it’s a journey/destination sort of problem. Some people just want a piece of software, and they can vibe code until the oceans dry up and will have no interest in this project. Other people take great joy in learning how to do things; [Deven] is one of those. A good tutorial is a great way to learn, since it artificially softens the learning curve compared to just jumping into a project with a man page or a datasheet.</p><p>Of course you’re still faced with the hallucination problem, something [Deven] admits in his excellent write-up. As he points out, the advantage is that you can call whatever model you plug into Lathe on its BS, and try and get a correct answer. Try that on Reddit, or most other places online. Sure, the tutorials aren’t going to match the best human-generated content, and [Deven] admits that. He’s using it for topics (like slicer design) that don’t have easy tutorials online — and sadly, his prediction that nobody is going to bother making good learning resources like they used to when they’ll just be scraped by LLMs is very likely true. It’s not that your options are vibe code or vibe-generated tutorial, but if that’s the direction the world is going, we’ll take the tutorial, thanks.</p><p>Getting the LLM to hold your hand through a tutorial might not appeal to the most Butlerian among us, but it’s a big step from that to the full cognitive surrender some people worry about.</p><p>The best way to better understand something is to teach it. For example if you make a lot of notes and convert those in a list of instructions and/or a cheat sheet you will understand.</p><p>I wouldn’t use an LLM to do that for me.</p><p>This is the answer.</p><p>First you learn the pieces. The. You assemble them so someone else could understand them. Then you see if the assembly makes sense and refine. Then you actually go teach someone else.</p><p>This make me a study guide tries to skip all of those steps. What’s sad about it for me is, there is so much free high quality content to learn from online for almost any topic. What good is this knowing it can hallucinate?</p><p>I agree.</p><p>Trying to explain to others how to use software you wrote can be very enlightening. Using LLMs to make docs or commit messages skips this opportunity to spot your own mistakes.</p><p>Documentation has been open-source weak point for a long time. Some do better than others. e.g. BSD, etc.</p><p>I agree, but most people can’t jump from “how do I do this” to “let me explain this” without actually going through the step of “do the thing”. A well-written tutorial can be a very good step along that road– but [devin] finds, and I kind of agree, that those are getting harder to find these days. So he’s got a hack that gets him tutorials.</p><p>Sounds like a way to quickly mass poison the training data sets that AI tools ingest, yeah, let’s all do this, it cannot fail. Either this was a joke article or i’m autistic and didn’t get the joke?</p><p>Don’t get how it is even on the table as an option that AI output isn’t curated by the humans that prompted it before recirculating it. Curation was always how we make this work.</p><p>If I can’t trust the plagiarism blender to extrude code I can trust, what makes you believe that I would trust its teachings?</p><p>I’m growing very tired of so much content about AI on Hackaday, especially since a lot of it ranges from useless to offensive, not gonna lie</p><p>Ptorne is a notrious ai booster and has a ridiculous online presence. The articles are tailor made to upset people because the boy is a troll</p><p>OK, but who is Ptorne? Do you believe that to be an alias of [Deven Jarvis], or the author of the piece?</p><p>But you’d trust a random person you’ve googled on the internet? I think this is a great way to use an LLM – don’t have it flat-out do something for you, have it teach it to you then you can do it yourself; have it check your work. I’m growing so very tired of people who are just flat-out refusing to work with AI.</p><p>I love the reference to Erlang as an odd choice because sometimes learning something in an odd way helps you do the mapping yourself</p><p>Saw a video yesterday about WhatsApp and BSD+Erlang. Some impressive stuff.</p><p>https://youtu.be/Qxft3E-jnKw?t=412</p><p>I’ll pass.</p><p>It is difficult enough to scrape things together when doing something new, without having to try and filter out bullshit generate by a random text maker.</p><p>This is the biggest problem with using LLMs. People all want to tell you how wonderfully well the LLM did in generating a text to explain things, but the people who use the explanations are the least capable of evaluating the generated text.</p><p>If you know nothing about, say, how to silver solder stainless steel wire and you ask a chatbot, it will give an answer – quite likely a detailed answer. Since you don’t know how to silver solder, you think the description from the chatbot looks good. You go and get tools and materials, and try to make stuff – and discover that none of what the chatbot told you is actually correct.</p><p>People who know don’t know their hats from a hole in the ground are all gushingly enthusiastic about how well chatbots work.</p><p>People other people look at the chatbot output and shake their heads at such bullshit.</p><p>This can be very true, but you should note that the guy who wrote this program is a professional coder, and is using it to generate learning materials for coding tasks he hasn’t yet mastered– that is, exactly the sort of person who could spot the flaws and make good use of the tool.</p><p>‘Professional coder’</p><p>That means nothing.</p><p>He once got a job coding something, somewhere.</p><p>In my experience, about half of ‘working coders’ can’t code.</p><p>A much higher % of applicants can’t code.</p><p>Best way to learn is by doing. Interest in Radio got me into writing code, first in python with the Yardstick One many many years ago, then C, C++, and golang when building my own radio hardware. The more you do the more you learn and understand. Today I have code in a majority of major radio projects, some are major features, some are bug fixes, and I write financial automation code for a living.</p><p>(I also write other tools and utilities as needed outside of radio). Its crazy how once you can write code you can look at things being described in talks, and write an implement if none if publicly available.</p><p>In learning C++, I have found “learncpp.com” to be very well-structured. However, I’m not at the point where I can look at a more complex (maybe overly complex) line of code and understand every aspect of it and why it was coded that way. I’m wondering if “lathe” can analyze a program and then be directed to a single line of code where each element and expression is thoroughly explained. This would include how it works, where else in the code it is connected to (with further explanations) and why this coding method was used … possibly offering alternative coding techniques such as simpler, faster, less memory usage, best practices, etc.</p><p>Documentation has been a HUGE complaint in the open source community for decades. That’s all I feel I want to say about this.</p><p>Oh! You don’t get it. Just read the man page with 5 or 6 commands and figure out the other 50 commands and variants. And don’t forget those 2 or 3 undocumented ones, that only the developers know. Simple. If you disagree then you’re stupid and unworthy to use that sacred tool (sarcasm). The sad part is that LLM already can organize scattered info to create better instructions/tutorials than many official ones. Also they always answer your questions. Incomplete or partial incorrect info is better than no info at all.</p><p>This reminds me of the most accurate proverb in life:</p><p>This that can, do.</p><p>Those that can’t, teach.</p><p>Those that cant teach, teach the teachers.</p><p>Applies to AI as well….</p><p>This is the closest I’ve seen for what I want to use AI for, hopping into open source projects without feeling overwhelmed trying to parse the entire structure of their codebase.</p><p>Pull the repo, set an AI to looking at it, then have it tell you where the code handles what you want to modify.</p><p>Like someone else mentioned documentation can be sorely lacking for many projects. Which makes it more difficult to do even something basic if you don’t know how to actually integrate it with the rest of the software.</p><p>Hallucinations would obviously still be an issue but a general hand wave in the correct direction is better than nothing when dropped into a random forest.</p><p>That’s what the search function in an editor is for. Search for keywords in the code, read the code and comments, get an understanding of what does what and where, find other keywords, search again, learn the structure of the code.</p><p>I’m sorry, but this just is a true tell tale that you just hate the technology and keep insisting you are right/know best, without having actually properly tried the technology.</p><p>I give you an example, but a bit of background on me. I’ve been a C developer for many many years and did a lot of shell (posix) programming too. I know OOO design principles, but am not a great C++ coder. Python is not my friend, but I get its developer appeal and i can read most of it, but not great at writing it by hand. Also, I haven’t properly coded in some time, as my role is more on the guiding/steering/menteoring/architecture levell.</p><p>Recently, I bought a tapo camera from our local budget retailer. Obviously, there was no way in hell I’d connect it to the internet, even once. Local access is possible from the lovely people of python-kasa, but it’s very much WIP for my camera (due to newer firmware changes). Also I will not use their propriatery app/cloud services either.</p><p>So there I have a camera, and I want to stream video from it, but also do things like ‘disable the ugly logo’ and ‘enable and view recordings’ all not possible today.</p><p>So I open create a new empty folder, open opencode, and tell it ‘download the official tapo app, decompile it and find out what endpoints we need to add to python-kasa (clone it into this repo first, and create a branch to make these modifications’. You can access the camera from this IP, to try your api calls out.) … or something like that. And yes, I first had setup a honeypot docker container on a dedicated wifi usb dongle, that supplies the camera with an IP.</p><p>That query, that setup that ‘takes me hours to setup’ too me about 30 second, maybe 1 minute. And it ran for a while. and lo and behold, it added a whole bunch of working endpoints to the app, by reverse engineering and probing. Was it perfect? hell no, and I gave it way too big of an excersize to work on. I could have been better in my prompting, but i was lazy, and wanted to get started quickly. Was there AI slop? of course, I have not setup my environment properly, having ‘skills’ that tell it how to write proper python, etc etc. (something that will also improve over the next months/years with these tools).</p><p>Could you have done the work yourself? absolutly, but not in the 60 seconds it took me. Can the tool do everything? No, and it shouldn’t. It’s a tool, and it can help when used wisley.</p><p>Is this a bad example because it’s about reverse engineering and not proper production software dev? I don’t think so, it’s just a showcase of one example that I have performed.</p><p>_(testo troncato)_</p>