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 hugel

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.