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For myself it's an incredible tool for learning. I learn both broader and deeper using chat tools. If anything it gives me a great "sounding board" for explorin

For myself it's an incredible tool for learning. I learn both broader and deeper using chat tools. If anything it gives me a great "sounding board" for exploring a subject and finding additional resources. E.g last night I setup my first Linux raid. A task that isn't too hard, but following a tutorial or just "reading the docs" isn't particularly helpful given it takes a few different tools (mount, umount, fstab, blkid, mdadm, fdisk, lsblk, mkfs) and along the way things might not follow the exact steps from a guide. I asked dozens of questions about each tool and step, where previously I would have just "copy paste and prayed". Two nights ago I was similarly able to fully recover all my data from a failed ssd also using chatgpt to guide my learning along the way. It was really cool to tackle a completely new skill having a "guide" even if it's wrong 20% of the time, that's way better than the average on the open Internet. For someone who loves learning, it feels like thousand league boots compared to just endlessly sifting through internet crap. Of course everything it says is suspect, just like everything else on the Internet, but boy it cuts out a lot of the hassle.

iLoveOncall 2y ago
Okay but this is not programming, more about an enhanced tutorial. This isn't at all what the original commenter is talking about.
manmal 2y ago
You’ve given two examples for “broad”, but none for “deep”. I’ve also used LLMs for setting up my homelab, and they were really helpful since I was basically at beginner level in most linux admin topics (still am). But trying to eg setup automatic snapshot replications for my zfs pool had me go back to reading blog posts, as ChatGPT just couldn’t provide a solution that worked for me.
- Spivak 2y ago
  I think one of the catch-22s of LLMs is that using it as a fancy search index (which is the dev assistant use-case) is that the information it surfaces is hugely dependent on what words you use and it matches energy. If you don't know the words you'll get very beginner oriented content and you can get it to surface deeper knowledge iff you know the shibboleths, but it's annoying. One dumb trick that's been unreasonably useful is just copy-pasting barely-related source code, but at the level you're trying to understand and then just asking an unrelated question— just yank that search vector way over to the region where you think the good information lives.
Delk 2y ago
My approach is typically to follow some kind of a guide or tutorial and to look into the man pages or other documentation for each tool as I go, to understand what the guide is suggesting. That's how I handled things e.g. when I needed to resize a partition and a filesystem in a LVM setup. Similarly to your RAID example, doing that required using a bunch of tools on multiple levels of storage abstraction: GPT partitions, LUKS tools, LVM physical and logical volumes, file system tools. I was familiar with some of those but didn't remember the incantations by heart, and for others I needed to learn new tools or concepts. I think I use a similar approach in programming when I'm getting into something I'm not quite familiar with. Stack Overflow answers and tutorials help give the outline of a possible solution. But if I don't understand some of the details, such as what a particular function does, I google them, preferring to get the details either from official documentation or from otherwise credible-sounding accounts.

iLoveOncall 2y ago

Okay but this is not programming, more about an enhanced tutorial. This isn't at all what the original commenter is talking about.

manmal 2y ago

You’ve given two examples for “broad”, but none for “deep”. I’ve also used LLMs for setting up my homelab, and they were really helpful since I was basically at beginner level in most linux admin topics (still am). But trying to eg setup automatic snapshot replications for my zfs pool had me go back to reading blog posts, as ChatGPT just couldn’t provide a solution that worked for me.

Spivak 2y ago
I think one of the catch-22s of LLMs is that using it as a fancy search index (which is the dev assistant use-case) is that the information it surfaces is hugely dependent on what words you use and it matches energy. If you don't know the words you'll get very beginner oriented content and you can get it to surface deeper knowledge iff you know the shibboleths, but it's annoying. One dumb trick that's been unreasonably useful is just copy-pasting barely-related source code, but at the level you're trying to understand and then just asking an unrelated question— just yank that search vector way over to the region where you think the good information lives.

Delk 2y ago

My approach is typically to follow some kind of a guide or tutorial and to look into the man pages or other documentation for each tool as I go, to understand what the guide is suggesting. That's how I handled things e.g. when I needed to resize a partition and a filesystem in a LVM setup. Similarly to your RAID example, doing that required using a bunch of tools on multiple levels of storage abstraction: GPT partitions, LUKS tools, LVM physical and logical volumes, file system tools. I was familiar with some of those but didn't remember the incantations by heart, and for others I needed to learn new tools or concepts. I think I use a similar approach in programming when I'm getting into something I'm not quite familiar with. Stack Overflow answers and tutorials help give the outline of a possible solution. But if I don't understand some of the details, such as what a particular function does, I google them, preferring to get the details either from official documentation or from otherwise credible-sounding accounts.