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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   1840 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 4, 2025

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In Project B, create a Private Connectivity Configuration under DMS → Private connectivity. Select the VPC from Project A that holds your source instance’s private IP

IIRC Gemini gave me this too. It's correct except this one line, where it hallucinates that it's possible to select a VPC from another project (you can't), and therefore the whole set of instructions are useless.

This btw is an extremely common failure mode in my opinion. You ask it to do something complex, and it builds a very nice way to do it, except there's one link in the chain that it completely invented out of the thin air. And it totally worked just like that if that link existed, except it does not. It could be an API method, a tool, a UI option, I've encountered a number of things - it all looks very neat, except for one detail that completely ruin the whole thing. And if you note about it, it cheerfully congratulates you on discovering it and even more cheerfully explains why it has always known this doesn't work and can't work. If a person kept doing this to me I'd be infuriated but you can't really blame a bunch of numbers.

I've pretty much given up on asking for troubleshooting help or other non-subjective feedback for this very reason. Even for scripting, it sometimes invents command switches that don't exist or that only work on certain OSes which means I need to correct it 5 times before I get a working script. And then, it often favors complex, messy, and difficult to maintain solutions over simple, elegant ones. Just about the only tech task LLMs are good for at this point is parsing stack traces or weird error messages. They're pretty handy for that.

Any task that can be described as "look up the thing which I describe, possibly in vague terms, among vast array of similar things, and bring it to me" is excellent for it. Using it as a search engine that understands natural language very frequently works. I use it multiple times a day this way and it helps a lot. Same for generating simple scripts that I know exactly what needs to be done, and maybe even have an example of doing similar thing but would have to spend 15-20 minutes tweaking it to do the other thing - it can give it to me in one minute. This is an awesome tool for such cases. But nowhere near "junior programmer" or "fresh law degree graduate" as some claim. At least if I had a junior like that on my team, I'd have a talk with the manager that hired him.

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