Data Carpentry for Biologists

Getting Help

Notes

  • Two general approaches to getting help when you don’t have someone to ask
  • Search
  • LLM
  • Get the vocabulary right
  • Specify the language/packages
  • Know good sources
    • Stack Overflow
    • Documentation pages
  • Search will increasingly return LLM answers
  • But these will be cheap LLM answers

LLMs

  • LLMs are good a debugging commonly written code
  • Specify the language/packages
  • Provide it your current code
  • Chat based interfaces can’t run your code
  • So provide the error message you are getting

Testing and modifying answers

  • Read the resulting solution
  • Does it make sense
  • Do you understand that it’s doing
  • If not, ask for an explantion
  • Test the changes
  • But be careful
  • Malicious code (both on help sites and via poisoning LLMs) exists