[bayindirh]

Putting that there's no guarantees for correctness for AI models aside, you miss the opportunity to read the docs and learn (or at least be aware of) the whole capabilities which may help you in the future.

You can bookmark the relevant doc page, and return to that whenever you need it. Instead you now have a buddy which you can bug and get answers in general, so you slowly wither your ability to do research, read more complex docs, and learn with collateral information (i.e. you learn something, and be aware of other features, so you slowly learn and internalize the whole subject).

Instead you ask, and get a nibble of information which is harder to connect to other bigger corpus you might have. You probably saved time this instance, but if you read the docs, you'll progressively spend less time on the subject, saving you tons of time down the road, plus you'll sharpen your ability to read docs and be faster at searching, reading and understanding them.

[saghm]

These arguments seem like they'd apply equally well to googling for the documentation to a specific function and then using the answer from the preview snippet (or clicking the link, reading exactly what you need, and then closing the tab without reading any further). I'm not saying that means they're wrong, but it's hard not to feel like it would be hyperbole to call that "rigging your foundations with explosives".

[bayindirh]

It's a matter of habit. I personally don't search for answers on the internet to begin with. I use Zeal/Dash to store docs of the tools I use locally, and directly read reference docs for what I need. If I need information from a very specific page, I always bookmark or take note of the specific page, and return to that automatically. I also always read beyond what I need to see whether I'm missing something or holding something wrong. If that's I use very frequently, I further document what I do, and how it works in my personal knowledge base.

In surface asking ChatGPT is not different using StackOverflow for everything, but I can argue that StackOverflow bears the same dangers, unless the answer given is comprehensive and written with collateral information in mind.

However, having a personal assistant on tap which can answer (or hallucinate) anything or everything will definitely make you lazy.

[williamcotton]

Here are the tools I will be using today:

F#, Jupyter, Python, R, MySQL, PostgresQL, ZSH (awk, sed, fill in the rest), VS Code, Excel, Word, git, and probably more.

This weekend I continued to work my way through Learn You a Haskell For Great Good, taking time to go over the functional programming concepts in both Haskell and F#. In addition I read most of Data Science at the Command Line, where I was introduced to ggplot2, so I then worked my through the online ggplot2 book.

I'm not very interested in memorizing the complete syntax, standard library, and common third-party libraries for the myriad of tools that I've listed above. I don't really see the point of learning how to read through the MySQL documentation.

Here's what I want to have in my brain: Most of Townes Van Zandt, Willie Nelson, and the Grateful Dead's catalog of songs so I can play them on acoustic guitar without a songsheet as I like to make eye contact with the audience.

So yeah, thank you for telling me that my approach is slowly withering my abilities.

I'll put this as nice as I can: You are very judgmental.

[itishappy]

Since you seem a bit touchy about the feedback you specifically requested, I'll take a tangent:

How are you finding ChatGPT for functional stuff? I found it to be unusably bad, unable to transform trivial programs. Have you found it helpful for Haskell or F#?

[williamcotton]

Oh, I have found it very helpful.

FWIW, it takes practice to get good at using ChatGPT. You have to direct it in certain ways and break up problems into bite sized chunks to do complex things like, eg, assist in writing a language server for a custom DSL using FParsec. If you don’t have a higher level understanding of the task and don’t break things into smaller tasks it won’t work very well!

[bayindirh]

> I'll put this as nice as I can: You are very judgmental.

Thanks for your direct and honest view. No hard feelings here.

Let me tell you. I know C, C++, Go, Java, bash, Eclipse IDE, git, Docker, Saltstack, Terraform, OpenStack, Kubernetes, some MATLAB and probably some other tools I forgot that I know, and I manage a big fleet of servers while I'm writing this.

I don't "remember" the syntax of anything. I somehow internalized them. I don't think about them. If I make a mistake, my text editor (which is NOT VSCode) politely tells me about it.

I also used to remember double bass parts of Bizet, Beethoven, symphonies of local composers, plus tons of songs, because while I had the sheets in front of me, I had to listen tubas & percussion to make sure that I'm in sync with them and watch the conductor to double-check the metronome in my head and get the tone cues if he's not happy with our tone. To make sure that our 100 person orchestra was playing at its peak performance I had to make sure that I know every kink and chicane of the traffic for our specific arrangement.

In these days I remember tango songs' traffic because I have to plan my figures 2-3 sentences ahead while dancing in a crowded hall.

Oh, I sometimes play a couple of songs in my bass guitar if I have time from other activities.

So, yeah, thank you for telling me that I'm judgemental.

I'll put this as nice as I can: The choice is yours, but you're underestimating your abilities. Plus, people who like to read docs and write code the hardcore way are not dorks.

Have a nice day.