The Silent Lurker

I remember the era of silence, it was just me and StackOverflow. I was among those million people who never asks question, lurking in the shadows and sipping the diamond water which was poured for someone else thirst. Answers for most of the problems were just few StackOverflow away. I wonder sometimes, what would happen when the problem I am facing is unique and no one in the whole world asked that question. It never happened by the way! The worstest fear we have in mind mostly will neveer happen.

Then, the world shited. I wasn’t just surfing, I was asking, I was feeling the main character energy. Unlike the StackOverflow, the answers were instant. Yeah, I am talking, ofcourse, about the LLMs. They got me hooked, development were faster. I thought every feature is just a clear prompt away. I am not googling anymore. These LLMs become the go to pit stop for all my coding problems.

But there is a trap in this speed.

The development is lot faster but at the expense of the code quality. It could be different for different developer, may be an excellent developer would make use of it and write excellent code. What about mediocre like me. I would write and debug the issue for a day.

I learned this the hard way when I was fighting with Gemini about the app links. For those who don’t know about that, it’s just a way of opening a app with a particular page when user launches with a link. For example, lets say you’ve booked a bus through RedBus, and you received the ticket link in WhatsApp, on click of that link, the RedBus app will open but not to the home page, but to the ticket page, showing the details of the ticket. I was chasing my tail all day, confidently pasting the code from Gemini, and looking at the red screen all day.

I was trying out different solutions that Gemini provides, Its like I am moving very fast but going nowhere. Accepting my defeat, I jumped into official documentation, trying to understand what is happening behind the hood. Within a hour, Kaboom! app links are working for app running in the background (i.e. app which is not closed from the recent apps). Only problem was with the cold start (i.e. when the app is not in the recent app), the splash screen is not working as expected. I went back to Gemini, tried the solution it provided, but it didn’t work this time as well.

But learning from my previous experience, I didn’t chase my tail this time. Jumped back to the google, found an GitHub issue in 10 minutes, it was just opened 3 days back. While looking into the issue, I figured out a solution. Kaboom again! app links are now in Namma Store application.

It taught me a lesson, never let the urgency of the moment trick you into trying different prompts, its better to jump into the google and research the problem yourself than trying to convince a hallucinating LLM.