Mehdi:
I completely agree with your observations. The Assistant, by design, relies
heavily on information retrieved from existing deal.II resources. As you
noted, this gives it strong recall and makes it a helpful tool for navigating
documentation, generating boilerplate code, or retrieving specific usage
patterns. However, when it comes to creating novel algorithms, its lack of
reasoning beyond the existing resources becomes apparent. I'll make sure to
highlight this limitation in the documentation.
I'm also encouraged to hear that you found value in using it for more routine
tasks, and I'll further refine it to improve retrieval accuracy.
I think it's useful for all of us to try out new tools. I've surely badgered
enough people over the years who are still using vi or emacs for programming
because they unnecessarily deprive themselves of tools that *actually*
understand an entire code base [1]. But I think it's also worthwhile to be
realistic about the benefits of AI tools -- a lot of people are promising that
they will make programmers 2x, 3x, or 4x faster, when actual experiments show
that that is not actually true:
https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/
Either way, I think we should all be open-minded about tools and where they
are best used. I appreciate you giving us a tool we can try, and for which we
can figure out what it is best at and what perhaps not.
Best
W.
[1] Just in case: If you spent a week configuring your vi to have access to a
symbol database, good for you. But that's not what everyone takes the time to
do, so let's not start an email thread about editors here.
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