Comment by 20k
8 hours ago
How is this faster than just reading the documentation? Given that LLMs hallucinate, you have to double check everything it says against the docs anyway
8 hours ago
How is this faster than just reading the documentation? Given that LLMs hallucinate, you have to double check everything it says against the docs anyway
I learn fastest from the examples, from application of the skill/knowledge - with explanations.
AIs allowed me to get on with Python MUCH faster than I was doing myself, and understand more of the arcane secrets of jq in 6 months than I was able in few years before.
And AIs mistakes are brilliant opportunity to debug, to analyse, and to go back to it saying "I beg you pardon, wth is this" :) pointing at the elementary mistakes you now see because you understand the flow better.
Recently I had a fantastic back and forth with Claude and one of my precious tools written in python - I was trying to understand the specifics of the particular function's behaviour, discussing typing, arguing about trade-offs and portability. The thing I really like in it that I always get a pushback or things to consider if I come up with something stupid.
It's a tailored team exercise and I'm enjoying it.
Human teachers make mistakes too. If you aren't consuming information with a skeptical eye you're not learning as effectively as you could be no matter what the source is.
The trick to learning with LLMs is to treat them as one of multiple sources of information, and work with those sources to build your own robust mental of how things work.
If you exclusively rely on official documentation you'll miss out on things that the documentation doesn't cover.
If I have to treat LLMs as a fallible source of information, why wouldn't I just go right to the source though? Having an extra step in between me and the actual truth seems pointless
WinAPI docs are pretty accurate and up to date
Because it's faster.
If the WinAPI docs are solid you can do things like copy and paste pages of them into Claude and ask a question, rather then manually scan through them looking for the answer yourself.
Apple's developer documentation is mostly awful - try finding out how to use the sips or sandbox-exec CLI tools for example. LLMs have unlocked those for me.
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Because it will take you years to read all the information you can get funneled through an LLM in a day
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Yes you have to be careful, but the LLM will read and process core and documentation literally millions of times faster than you, so it's worth it
I mean, is it really that hard to find information in the docs?
Like, if I want to find out what, I don't know, "GetQueuedCompletionStatus" does. I google
GetQueuedCompletionStatus
Find this page:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/ioapiset...
Bam, that's the single source of truth right there. Microsoft's docs are pretty great
If I use an LLM, I have to ask it for the documentation about "GetQueuedCompletionStatus". Then I have to double check its output, because LLMs hallaucinate
Doubly checking its output involves googling "GetQueuedCompletionStatus", finding this page:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/ioapiset...
And then reading the docs to validate whether or not what its told me is correct. How does this save me any time?
How about we do the following.
I have not done win32 programming in 12 years. Maybe you've done it more recently. I'll use an LLM and you look up things manually. We can see, who can build a win32 admin UI that shows a realtime view of every open file by process with sorting, filtering and search on both the files and process/command names.
I estimate this will take me 5 minutes Would you like to race?
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Why does it matter? We have table of contents, index and references for books and other contents. That’s a lot of navigational aid. Also they help in providing you a general overview of the domain.