[rurp]

The question at hand is pretty easy to test manually and the information you get is much more useful. You will get to see the exact behavior for yourself, can easily build on the test case as related questions come up, and you know the information you are getting is correct rather than a hallucination.

Copying information from ChatGPT is the newer version of blindly copying answers from StackOverflow. It often works out ok and at times makes sense to do, but it can easily lead to software flaws and doesn't do much to build a better undersanding of the domain which is necessary to solve more difficult challenges that don't fit into a Q&A format well.

[speedgoose]

In my experience, I encounter more issues and waste more time when I fiddle on my own and try stuff compared to doing the same, but using chatGPT.

There is a lot of knowledge that I don’t want to have expertise with. Sure, I could carefully read the PostgreSQL documentation about triggers and implement it myself, or I could get the job done in a few minutes and procrastinate on HN instead.

[JoshuaDavid]

> The question at hand is pretty easy to test manually and the information you get is much more useful.

This approach can be hazardous to the health of the product you're building. For example, if you take this approach to answer the question of "what happens if I have two connections to a MySQL database, start a transaction in one of them and insert a row (but don't commit) and then issue a SELECT which would show the inserted row", then you will see consistent results across all of the experiments you run with that particular database, but you could easily end up with bugs that only show up when the transaction isolation level changes from how you tested it.

Whereas if you search for or ask that question, the answers you get will likely mention that transaction isolation levels are a thing.

You might also be able to get this level of knowledge by reading the manual, though there will still be things that are not included in the manual but do come up regularly in discussions on the wider internet.

[SoftTalker]

> you could easily end up with bugs that only show up when the transaction isolation level changes from how you tested it.

In fact it's very likely you would. You have to understand the transaction semantics and test with all the isolation levels and database platforms you intend to support. If you don't know this, you need to learn more about relational databases before building a product on top of them.

[JoshuaDavid]

> If you don't know this, you need to learn more about relational databases before building a product on top of them.

And now extend this principle to everything in the stack.

[smy20011]

You should at least have some basic ideas about your stack.

[JoshuaDavid]

Agreed. But also if you suddenly find that the precise behavior of one of the parts of your stack matters, you would be well advised to search the internet about how exactly that bit works in practice and whether there are any nonobvious footguns in addition to your empirical testing and the stuff that the manual claims is true.