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Vent: That AI coding assistant I bought keeps suggesting WRONG fixes
I paid $30 a month for an AI coding tool to help me debug a Node.js script for work. Problem was, it kept suggesting solutions that broke my existing code or didn't even run. After 3 wasted evenings, I tried a trick: I fed it my exact error log line by line instead of explaining the issue in plain English. That finally worked, it spotted a missing semicolon I'd overlooked for days. Has anyone else had better luck by being super literal with these bots?
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wesleyb2019d ago
Feed it the exact raw error text every single time. I learned that lesson after wasting a whole weekend on a similar tool. It turns out these things are way better at parsing error logs than they are at understanding what you think the problem is. You gotta treat them like a junior dev who needs every detail spelled out in the most boring way possible. No shortcuts, no summaries, just copy paste the mess straight from your terminal. Once I started doing that, the suggestions went from useless to actually helpful about 70% of the time.
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torres.thea19d ago
Read somewhere that feeding them raw terminal output works way better than explaining.
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oliverhernandez19d ago
Wait you actually DID a full line by line feed of the error log? I would've given up after like 5 lines and just thrown my laptop out the window. That sounds SO tedious but I guess it makes sense since the bots probably get confused by human words. I had a similar thing happen where I described a network timeout issue and it kept telling me to check my firewall settings but the real problem was a typo in my API endpoint URL that I never would've caught without pasting the raw error.
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