[simonw]

Because it's faster.

If the WinAPI docs are solid you can do things like copy and paste pages of them into Claude and ask a question, rather then manually scan through them looking for the answer yourself.

Apple's developer documentation is mostly awful - try finding out how to use the sips or sandbox-exec CLI tools for example. LLMs have unlocked those for me.

[20k]

But you have to check the answer against the documentation anyway though, to validate that its actually correct!

Unless you're just taking the LLM answers at face value?

[simonw]

For most code stuff you don't check the answer against the documentation - you write the code and run it and see if it works.

That's always a better signal than anything that official documentation might tell you.

[20k]

That seems like a strong error, you have no idea if it works or if it just happens to work

[simonw]

If you're good at programming you can usually tell exactly why it worked or didn't work. That's how we've all worked before coding agents came along too - you don't blindly assume the snippet you pasted off StackOverflow will work, you try it and poke at it and use it to build a firm mental model of whether it's the right thing or not.

[20k]

Sure. A big part of how I'd know that the function I'm calling does what I think it does, is by reading the source documentation associated with it

Does it have any threading preconditions? Any weird quirks? Any strange UB? That's stuff you can't find out just by testing. You can ask the LLM, but then you have to read the docs anyway to check its answer

[simonw]

I envy you for the universally high quality of documentation that the code you are working with has!