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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

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Apologies if I came on too hard, it's just you've been expressing this opinion for a while and had gone down several reply chains without bringing the thing to the object level. It's emblematic of the whole question, AI is "spikey", as in it's very good at some things and inexplicably bad at some other things. I don't think a lot of people would take so much offense if you just said it still seems bad at some tasks, that's broadly a consensus. But when you just say it "sucks at code" it's perplexing to the people watching it effortlessly do wide swaths of what used to be core programming work.

I could definitely see it struggle with highly context dependent config files but something seems strange about it not producing at least a valid file, did you try different prompts and giving it different contexts? I find giving it an example of valid output helps but I'm not familiar with fluentd and it's possible giving it enough context is unreasonable.

I have not tried that, but it also seems like kind of a failure of the tool if I have to, you know? The whole point of a tool that can understand natural language is that you can just talk to it normally. If one has to figure out how to word the incantations just right to get a useful result... I'm not sure how that's better than just figuring out the code myself at that point.

Prompting is a skill like any other. Sending it off without context is like telling an underling to fix your config file without explaining or letting them look at the system they're writing it for. It's often a mistake to assume the prompt needs to be something a human would understand. You can and should just dump unformatted logs, barely related examples of working config files, anything you can imagine an underline with infinite time in a locked room might find useful in solving your problem.