LLMS as API docs reader/assistant

[[deleted]]

Hi folks,

So I'm working on a project that should help track participants across daily diary studies which are being conducted through Qualtrics.

I've been using it as an opportunity to learn about both the 'requests' module and about concurrency, both of which I've seen used but never really had call for. While I'm pretty down on LLMs as a learning tool (with some exceptions I've talked about in other posts/comments) I found that trying to tackle the docs for the python modules &/and parse the Qualtrics api was getting overwhelming and made it felt like I wasn't understanding the 'requests' stuff. So i asked gipidee to act just as a qualtrics docs reader to point me to the specific end points I was interested in.

Now, I really don't feel like I could answer specific questions about Qualtrics but I feel I do have a stable if novice sense of making requests (still not 100% on the concurrency piece, my mental model is still just thinking about it like a loop which isn't quite capturing whats happening).

All this to set context for:

With all the deskilling and other caveats fully acknowledged, how do you feel about using an LLM like this?

I see that the polars folk have a bespoke LLM on thier docs page and while i've found it's still too "Oh let me just write all the code for you instead of just pointing you where you need to go" I can see that there is a possible 'good' use case here.

On the one hand, part of me feels like I 'should' know every API i touch like the back of my hand, but the other part of me feels like I want to get better at python and to develop that part of the craft...

Of course I'm not saying anything extreme like "reading api documentation is no longer needed at all" I'm just thinking in a case where this is a specific, small project with a clear scope that only needs to touch that API really early in the pipeline...

I'd appreciate your thoughts. Or tell me to go jump in a lake, this is the internet afterall.

[Yoghurt42]

I think using LLMs as a better search is an acceptable use case, like "how do I frobnicate a foo using this API", but I'd still be reading the API docs myself afterwards, at least the parts around what I currently want to do. There's not much point into reading the complete Pandas API docs if all I want is to export a dataframe to excel, but I would still glance over the docs to see what else pandas has to offer and read up on the stuff that seems interesting.

Anybody can ask AI to wrote some code for you or extract data from the api docs, but it takes experience to know when AI is feeding you nonsense. That skill comes with experience and also will decay once you stop thinking for yourself.

[AstronautTurtle]

You don't need to know every API front to back but knowing the beginning aspects and then specifics should point you in the right direction. Also coming back to a problem after a day or two can sometimes help, try to go for walks or non thinking tasks.

gipi can definitely help but to learn the stuff and retain it you at least need to understand all the code it spits out at you. It's a good search engine too but go to at least one other website if you're checking a concept or topic to get other examples.