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Please no. The site is an important resource for people learning JS and other web technologies and AI is great at explaining code snippets which would otherwise
by hagreet 3y ago
Please no. The site is an important resource for people learning JS and other web technologies and AI is great at explaining code snippets which would otherwise be follow-up look-ups and at explaining what the often very dense MDN content means. And AI is actually really good at generating code as well, you just have to review it like it was written by a junior dev.
I think most of the hate for current AI tools comes from the fact that people expect the computer from Star Trek which always provides perfect answers.
Edit: So yes, it needs to be made super obvious to users that it might give you wrong answers.
- sensanaty 3y agoExcept it gets mostly everything wrong, even very simple things that are on the page itself. https://github.com/mdn/yari/issues/9208 https://github.com/mdn/yari/issues/9208
- jai_ 3y agoI'm really not sure how you can argue that "AI is great at explaining code snippets" while also acknowledging that it will just give you flat out wrong answers some times. Either it's good at explaining and is right, or is bad at explaining and is wrong. Applying the logic of it being "right most of the time" seems really bad for a tool applied to a reference documentation website.
- hagreet 3y agoSorry, if that wasn't clear but I think MDN is not only reference documentation. I agree, for the reference part the AI shouldn't do more than trying to point you to the right parts of the text. But for learning things, nice explanations, even if sometimes slightly off, can be a lot better to digest than reference documentation. I'm not saying it's great yet, but there is potential for having something that can hand-wave away some details like a human would when explaining something to a beginner.