Devlog 3: Dependencies and hallucinations

I’m generally an anti-AI person. I don’t like the technology and I’m not a fan of offloading my thinking to a machine that cares so little about me that it can’t even deprive itself of sleep for the sake of my project. However, it became clear that Smithay’s documentation was doing me no favors. Begrudgingly, I turned to Gemini.

It was actually really helpful at first. I’ve been working on moving from a winit window to being able to run the compositor from a TTY or display manager, and it’s been “fun” (emphasis on the air quotes). Anyway, Gemini was able to explain what I had to do and help me understand things better.

Unfortunately, it’s also dumb. It consistently told me to use nonexistent APIs and misuse real ones. It at one point told me to loop over a bunch of connectors gotten from a DrmDevice. Getting them worked, but it then immediately instructed me to compare a value to a nonexistent enum. I had to find the source code for the library itself, which was a pain because I couldn’t find the relevant code anywhere in Smithay’s docs.rs documentation or even source code! Eventually, I realized that I should be looking in a dependency of Smithay instead of Smithay itself, and I found what I was looking for.

I still haven’t achieved what I set out to do, and I wrote this half an hour before midnight. cries in sleep deprivation