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Comment by rychco | Hacker News Reader

Completely agree. It gives me the headstart I need that would otherwise take hours of careful searching + crawling through docs, source code, examples, issue trackers, etc.

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Do you not feel like you're losing something here, though? You haven't learned anything new or improved your understanding as you would have if you did the research.

This is my concern as well, since I learn so much by incidentally reading docs and example code. That said, many people copy-paste Stack Overflow code without reading or understanding it. So, this is not a new problem.

Not necessarily, no. I still need to refer to the docs, but now I get some additional context. As a simple example, if there’s some library that needs initialization I can ask “how do I initialize a new <library thing>?”. Then it’ll spit out a maybe correct example of initialization, but most importantly it’ll have some new keywords/functions/buzzwords that provide extra context for my manual search through documentation & source code.

If I were a student, yeah it could probably do my homework. As a professional, I find that it greatly helps me navigate through related ideas.

I definitely learned a lot. Since I had to cross reference to text books, Wikipedia, and github, I gained a good grasp of the material. It helped that I had a math and stats background, though. But, I imagine learning linear algebra this way would work well too.

For code using it like that, I live or as well, no need to try to understand the API docs (if even usable ), just be pointed in the right direction.

But code has a pretty strict check on correctness afterwards, thinking about it its pretty scary how chatgpt results can be used without proper validation. And they will, the step from "looks good to me" to "it is good" is a small one when you just want an answer.

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