This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
With Tailwind it's less their specific documentation, it's more that it became an industry best practice for new projects. There is just so much Tailwind content on GitHub and in blogposts. It's also specifically targeted by the LLM teams developing models.
Claude actually knows Tailwind better than CSS and will sometimes try to use it in projects that don't have it installed.
I think that scraping public GitHub repos is actually more important to LLM performance than documentation about your specific project. That all gets baked into the core model. If you're doing something with a lot of public examples it will one shot it.
I have a specific example. I've been playing around with implementing a db compatible clone of themotte/rDrama in node / react to get around some of the issues the codebase has. Two slightly incompatible markdown renderers on the front and back, old school bootstrap modals, etc.
I mentioned themotte/rDrama in my instructions to Claude Code and it put in some very rDrama like features such as coloured indent level bars on comments.
So it was clearly aware.
As a result a lot of the benchmark projects people try to use to document model performance become useless. The model can look up public examples of the answer.
LLMs are very good at the sort of thing that really should have been automated by now anyways. eg converting nested json object from a POST request into rows in SQL tables.
When you're doing something less common it has a lot more trouble. It does seem a lot better at working on my minecraft mod project than it was six months ago. That's probably due in part to scraping the public repo of the mod itself. It has a rough image of the working endpoints without needing to look at any context.
I suspect that offline models will become good enough in the near future that large legacy projects will be able to fine tune a model against the codebase.
This is an angle I wish I would've thought to include in my original post. That of LLMs as very, very, very, very good targeted search engines. That's, actually, probably where the most immediate disruption will occur. There's a graph going around of StackOverflow traffic and its decline is remarkable.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link