[hirvi74]

> choosing to use AI isn't all or nothing.

That's how I have been using AI the entire time. I do not use Claude Code or Codex. I just use AI to ask questions instead of parsing the increasingly poor Google search results.

I just use the chat options in the web applications with manual copy/pasting back and forth if/when necessary. It's been wonderful because I feel quite productive, and I do not really have much of an AI dependency. I am still doing all of my work, but I can get a quicker answer to simple questions than parsing through a handful of outdated blogs and StackOverflow answers.

If I have learned one thing about programming computers in my career, it is that not all documentation (even official documentation) was created equally.

[docmars]

It's funny you say this because this is considered the "old" way to use LLMs since agents can write code so well, but I don't think enough people realize how much more efficient your preferred approach is compared to the era before LLMs were widely available at all.

Gone are the days of hopeless Googling where 20 minutes of research becomes 3 hours with the possibility of having zero solutions. The sheer efficiency of having reliable, immediate answers is a tremendous improvement, even if you're choosing to write everything by hand using it as a reference.

[johnnyanmac]

"Reliable" is still a huge misnomer here. You definitely need to grok through hallucinations and sometimes come up empty.

[sgarland]

Same! I don't mind copy/pasting a code snippet or asking a question, and I also always ask it to show its sources for anything non-obvious. That alone cuts down on a lot of bullshit.