[williamcotton]

I know plenty of fantastic engineers that use LLM tools as code assistants.

I’m not sure when and why reading documentation and man pages became a sign of a lack of skill. Watch a presentation by someone like Brian Kernighan and you’ll see him joke about looking up certain compiler flags for the thousandth time!

Personally I work in C, C#, F#, Java, Kotlin, Swift, R, Ruby, Python, Postgres SQL, MySQL SQL, TypeScript, node, and whatever hundreds of libraries and DSLs are built on top. Yes, I have to look up documentation and with regularity.

[fragmede]

Add Golang and rust and JavaScript and next.js and react to the list for me. ;) If you live and work and breathe in the same kernel, operating system, and user space, and don't end up memorizing the various bits of minutiae, I'd judge you (and me) too, but it's not the 2000's, or the 90's or even the 80's anymore, and some of us don't have the luxury, or have chosen not to, live in one small niche for our entire career. At the end of the day, the client doesn't care what language you use, or the framework, or even the code quality, as long as it works. What they don't want to pay for is overage, and taking the previous developer's work and refactoring it and rewriting it in your preferred language isn't high value work, so you pick up whatever they used and run with it. Yeah that makes me less fluent in that one particular thing, not having done the same thing for 20+ years, but that's not where I deliver value. Some people do, and that's great for them and their employers, but my expertise lies elsewhere. I got real good at MFC, back in the day, and then WX and Qt and I'm working on getting good at react and such.

[FpUser]

Same opinion here. I work with way too many things to keep everything in my head. I'd rather use my head for design than to remember every function and parameter of say STL

[specialist]

For me, thus far, LLMs help me forage docs. I know what I want and it helps me narrow my search faster. Watching adepts like Simon Willison wield LLMs is on my to do list.