The best programmers I know

Reading documentation - if you are junior take time to go one level deeper to understand / fix issues you have. Then read also stuff adjacent to that.

By trying to read some documentation like a book from cover to cover will be waste of time.

Absolutely. LLMs offer you compressed documentation at your fingertips. Instead of scrolling through man pages and function references to find that specific flag or parameter you are interested in for the problem at hand, you can directly formulate such a question to the LLM, and it will give you a pretty good result.

Another issue LLMs help with is identifying the correct keywords or terms to look up. Especially with manpages, I've had numerous times where I roughly know what I'm looking for, but in the presence of hundred-plus flags and options, I can't even grep to the right place because I don't know the exact term I need. So I sometimes use LLMs as glorified grep with semantic synonym support.

Reading documentation cover to cover for tools you use a lot is a very worthwhile investment in my opinion. Junior dev or not.

There are always better sources to read usually than documentation cover to cover.

There is no "only SO and LLM shortest path" vs "always read full documentation" - there are always more sources like blog posts, walk troughs that will be much better investment of time.

Sometimes you need someone to explain architecture of the tool much differently than it is described in documentation when documentation is dry. Sometimes you need better examples better aligned to what you are trying to do. You need different approaches to grasp the thing.

Sometimes I just open the NumPy or the Python docs and browse it (or other libraries like PyTorch). Even after about 2 decades of Python experience, I often find something new and neat even on the "basic" pages that I didn't know about. Reading release notes can be useful also.

Many people seem to have an irrational aversion to reading documentation and manuals. They'd rather speculate and guess and state false things than to just open the docs to understand how the thing works.

I'd say if you use the tool daily for years, it makes sense to invest into actually reading the docs.

I think the GP was proposing an organic way to expand knowledge. Reading adjacent documentation expands your knowledge of what’s possible. An LLM will tell you how to do a specific thing, but you need to know such a thing is possible before you can effectively ask about it.

In this way, LLMs may passively discourage discovery by providing immediate, specific answers. Sometimes there is value in the journey.