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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1339 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 24, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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So, I had an interesting problem at work, that revealed something fascinating I think.

I have to beat around the bush some, so bear with me. We're using a popular framework for our database layer. We went to do things to this database that theoretically the database is capable of, but the framework doesn't support. Sad face. All the web searches, and associated AI formulated answers confirm, it's not possible do said thing in said framework.

Except it is. The Framework is open source. You can just read the source code. Turns out you can ask for the handle to the underlying interop pointer, and it'll just give it to you. You don't even have to do weird fucky things like dig around in private data space. It's a public API call to just get the interop pointer. The driver it's calling is open source too, and you can just call the function you want on the interop pointer it gives you, and it just works. It's fine. If it's confusing, the test cases for the driver in it's github even shows you exactly how to do it, multiple ways. Reading unit tests are awesome for stuff like that. This is the furthest thing from impossible. It's practically spelled out for you with examples if you just read the fucking code.

So, why does AI all think it's impossible? Because as of 3 years ago, this functionality wasn't exposed by the driver. So all the stack exchange questions about this correctly stated that as of 3+ years ago, this was impossible. LLMs got trained on stack exchange (supposedly), and now stack exchange is a dead site. The LLMs (supposedly) killed off the source of knowledge they were being trained on, and now they can't learn that a few years later this task is not just possible, but trivially easy in like, 6 lines of code. Totally within the remit of the typical "how do I do thing" programming question.

Just point it at the source code or github? Sometimes I get issues where it doesn't know what the right conventions are for calling its own API or recently released APIs, since that obviously comes after its training and I say 'go check it up' and then it does that.

Ideally it should do this by default, true.

But why? Within 30 minutes of finding the code, I found my answer. Within 10 minutes of dicking around in a sample project, I had my proof of concept. How would an LLM have improved on that? I don't need the LLMs validation or approval.

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