[linsomniac]

>I wanted the thing 30 years had taught him

Unpopular answer that the author seems to be dismissing: Maybe the thing that 30 years has taught this guy is that the LLMs can answer the question better than he can. Or that he can't give a substantive answer without doing research into it with an LLM.

>LMGTFY

I mostly saw LMGTFY used when the question was the sort of thing that a person would have to research but that google results had a high chance of getting with "I'm feeling lucky".

If you've already done a bunch of research, and already asked the LLMs, when someone says "Honestly, ask Claude", you should be able to come back with what results you got to your question and what you need clarification on.

I've been doing programming and sys admin for 40 years. When I run a coworkers question through the AI tooling and talk through the answer with them, it's because my 40 years of experience tells me that's the next step.

[bloaf]

I think the other alternative is that the senior guy thinks that the junior guy is working on a problem where the juice isn't worth the squeeze. "Just ask an LLM" can be interpreted as "if the AI can't give you a quick solution, it won't be worth either one of our times to puzzle out the technical details."

[watwut]

> Unpopular answer that the author seems to be dismissing: Maybe the thing that 30 years has taught this guy is that the LLMs can answer the question better than he can. Or that he can't give a substantive answer without doing research into it with an LLM.

Just say "I don't know". It is simple and short.

[sanex]

Going to agree with you here. There's two types of "ask an llm." There's the "I don't know but whatever the llm said is probably right" and the "lmgtfy, did you even try?" Based on the post his exact quote sounds more like 1 but obviously some people deserve the 2 sometimes.