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> Not only that, but it has the patience of a saint. It never makes you beg for a solution because it thinks there's an XY problem. It never says "RTFM" before posting an irrelevant part of the documentation because it only skimmed your post. It never says "Why would you use X in 2023? Everyone is using framework Y, I would never hire anyone using X."

> The difference comes down to this: unlike a human, it doesn't have an ego or an unwarranted feeling of superiority because it learned an obscure technology.

The reason for these harsh answers is not ego or feeling of superiority, but rather a real willingness to help the respective person without wasting an insane amount of time for both sides. Just like one likes to write concise code, quite some experienced programmers love to give very concise, but helpful answers. If the answer is in the manual, "RTFM" is a helpful answer. Giving strongly opinionated technology recommendations is also very helpful way to give the beginner a strong hint what might be a good choice (until the beginner has a very good judgement of this on his own).

I know that this concise style of talking does not fit the "sugar-coated" kind of speaking that is (unluckily) common in society. But it is much more helpful (in particular for learning programming).




On the other hand, ChatGPT will helpfully run a bing search, open the relevant manual, summarize the information, and include additional hints or example code without you needing to do anything. It will also provide you the link, in case you wish to verify or read the source material itself.

So while RTFM is a useful answer when you (the expert) are limited by your own time & energy, LLMs present a fundamental paradigm shift that is both more user-friendly and arguably more useful. Asking someone to go from an LLM back to RTFM today would be ~akin to asking someone to go from Google search back to hand-written site listings in 2003.

You could try, but for most people there simply is no going back.




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