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Comment by mikestorrent

21 hours ago

Nginx is extremely well represented in AI training material, so virtually every decent model - even locally hosted ones - can deliver you solid answers about its config settings.

Call me an old crusty Luddite if you will, after all you'd not be wrong, but…

I feel that if I can't work something out without asking a generative ML model, then I probably don't understand it well enough to properly assess the generated answer, and if I didn't understand the documentation well enough in the first place then “verify it against the documentation” is not a suitable answer, so I probably shouldn't be self-hosting that system on the open network.

It is quite irritating that the existence of generative models is apparently becoming an acceptable excuse for inadequate documentation. Rather than suggesting that I ask copilot when the documentation Azure is lacking, perhaps MS should as copilot to generate some better documentation (and have their human domain experts review it for correctness) so we have good documentation to work from. It strikes me that them using a bunch of LLM crunching power up-front is likely to me more efficient than a great many of us spending smaller amounts or resources each (many of us asking the same questions) at the point of consumption.