Tangental, but my LSP config breaks every few months. I don't bother to fix it anymore, I open an LLM in ~/dotfiles and complain until it works again, usually in a few minutes.

What's interesting is observing how much work this takes. (it gives me much more empathy toward my past self; how was a clumsy human supposed to know and reason about these things!?, especially when I hadn't touched the configs since a few months prior and had forgotten them almost entirely).

Most often there's 10-20 very small programs all working together to give the desired experience. The amount of minutes and tokens required to solve these seemingly simple problems like "My LSP isn't working" is sometimes much more than expected.

I have the exact same anecdote; it makes me wonder if this is a common enough use case that a small language model could be trained and run locally for these kinds of “configuration bullshit problems”.

I feel like a very large percentage of my Claude usage ends up having it automate configuration shit, because historically that has been the part of software engineering I have always hated.

I bet if you look back, you were using a lot less effort in the past than what you see the LLM doing now. They are pretty bad at taking a straight line to the solution.

This seems like the LLM is vastly overcomplicating things. My entire Neovim config is a single 500 line init.lua and this is enough for LSP to work.