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The best programmers I know

(endler.dev)
628 points kiyanwang | 1 comments | 09 Apr 25 06:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.203s | source
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ozim ◴[09 Apr 25 07:52 UTC] No.43629839[source]▶
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.

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bluetomcat ◴[09 Apr 25 08:38 UTC] No.43630090[source]▶
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.
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1. Zanfa ◴[09 Apr 25 09:10 UTC] No.43630266[source]▶
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.