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Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

Both tools have their use-cases. I think with the advent of LLMs like ChatGPT it has also become a lot easier to get the proper command line incantation for whatever tool you're using. Even if you've read the manual previously, it's easy to forget the exact flags you want to use, and validating the generated command line is usually less effort than having to build it up yourself from scratch by reading the manual.

With the modern web, sometimes it's easier to use a tool like Puppeteer from a custom script. Especially if the sites you're interacting with are using a lot of JS.

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I just look at my curl / wget note for some sane examples. i cant believe one needed chatgpt to be productive

If chatgpt makes someone more productive, then why not. It's just a tool as any other tool.

I agree with this sentiment. But I also have personal antidotes that make me cautious about it. When I was a child I memorized dozens of phone numbers of people I called a couple times a month. Now my phone memorizes any phone number for me. We used to memorize poems and such. I can't give you any scientific reason why it is good to have memorized the Gettysburg Address. But I feel intuitively that there is some benefit to exercise your brain similar to the intuition I have about exercising muscles.

If a person thinks they benefit from 100 situps a day, I'm not going to disagree. And if they think there is some benefit in reading man pages, well, thanks to those who take the time to write all that ducumentation.

When it backfires you're screwed, I have experienced it one using curl -L

You don't need much of anything, it's just another tool to help people figure stuff out. If you've already invested the time in reading through the manuals for these tools then maybe you don't get much out of something like ChatGPT, but consider that there's thousands of new people entering the industry every year and the number of tools which they're expected to learn to use has increased over time.

It's fine when you've read the man page at least once. If you just cowboy your way through every task, you'll never even be aware of what your tools can do. Which results in comments we've all seen: "I can't believe curl/Firefox/vim/readline/whatever can do something like that!" about something so trivial that every good poweruser/sysadmin has known it for decades (because it's in the man page).

Sure, but that's knowledge you pick up over years. You can't reasonably expect people to frontload all of it on the first pass with every single tool they interact with, especially when starting off.

I've read through most of the man pages of every tool I use at least once, but it has taken me years, and I've done it incrementally.

Personally I use my memory. It's a bit disturbing that some people can't write code without reading the reference for basics.

I just memorise the man page. I can't believe etc etc etc

(Seriously, there's a million nix flags, and only so many brain cells. ChatGPT's better than Google for simple "what's the magic incantation?" searches, and laziness is a virtue. If you don't want to be lazy that's fine, but I think you're missing out).

I would love to see your curl / wget note if you don't mind.

I like tldr for quick examples. If it doesn't have what I need, then I fall back to phind or some other llm. Nice thing about tldr is there's an offline version.

https://tldr.inbrowser.app/pages/common/curl

https://tldr.inbrowser.app/pages/common/wget

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