Comment by killerstorm

I think a large fraction of my programming skills come from looking through open source code bases. E.g. I'd download some code and spend some time navigating through files looking for something specific, e.g. "how is X implemented?", "what do I need to change to add Y?".

I think it works a bit like pre-training: to find what you want quickly you need to have a model of coding process, i.e. why certain files were put into certain directories, etc.

I don't think this process is incompatible with LLM use...