Ironically, the most specific and most urgent questions, the ones that can't be answered by artificial intelligence as they don't yield any good results using straightforward search queries, are the questions that don't get any helpful answers when I ask them on slack, in a forum, or on StackOverflow.
StackOverflow used to have a badge called "tumbleweed", inspired by the old wild-west movies featuring abondoned villages where there is more tumbleweed than people moving on the main street.
To be fair, most questions either got an answer eventually, or I added one myself. Often the solution was something that I would have considered a hack or a workaround, even when it turned out to be common practice.
Do you have similar experiences? What do you do if you don't get answers to urgent development questions?
Top comments (8)
Open issues where neither community effort (swarm intelligence) nor vibe coding or AI-assisted debugging has helped so far:
At least the last two are resolved, at least formally:
There is an official best practice recommendation, and I actually applied it on several clients' websites already: keep the pastel theme with low color contrast matching an inaccessible brand design, but offer a high-contrast button. While that satisfies WCAG criteria, it keeps confusing end useres and feels like a disimprovement (Verschlimmbesserung).
My black screen issue persists and it keeps annoying me eventually, but not enough to switch to another distribution, even more so as I'm not even sure if that's a fix. I've had similar erratic issues in the past, including printer problems with cups drivers broken due to Python 2 to Python 3 migration, and cheap "German" wifi routers (actually made in China) failing to ensure stable wifi connection with certain Thinkpad and Huawei Android phones. None of those problems had a real solution apart from eventually switching to another device sooner or later.
In any case, coming back to my unanswered tumbleweed classics every now and then and ask the current AI models to reason and reasearch for a better solution, considering what I have already tried, even when timeboxed, sums up to even more wasted time.
It always been my problem with those sites, I usually don't have time to wait haha. If no one already answered it, and Chat GPT can't, then it's time to roll up the sleeves or to change course...
Another kind of tumbleweed posts are those doomed to abandonment by not accepting answers anymore. Some examples:
What I like to do is drive really fast, so that due to time dilation the tumbleweeds go past really quickly. When I pull in to park, my question is often answered, though most of my friends are now too old to remember me.
Do you like to drive fast and break things? Seriously, I have learned that I should prefer workarounds to perfect solutions BUT also leave a "TODO" comment so that I can improve the solution later, either after somebody else added a new idea, or when I found something out myself. There is also a chance that bugfixes and enhancements in third-party software eventually solve the original problem.
I usually try to find and answer myself by deepening my understanding of the question. It doesn't always work, but beats standing around watching the tumble weeds tumble.
Does that means - tumbled :)
wonderful