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Comment by chrisweekly | Hacker News Reader

Why involve an LLM at all, if you're looking up docs for a particular tool like rsync?

Lots of reasons! First off: where else do I go to learn this stuff? Man pages are reference for people who work in CLI all the time and not for virgin learners as they are are necessarily packed with the complete lexicon but with barely a thought to explaining real world examples of common tasks. There are a million Linux websites with the same versioning issues and inadequate explanations. I guess I could buy an oreily book and learn the topic end to end even though I will only need to know the syntax of a couple commands.

With an LLM, I can get it to tell me what each parameter it suggests actually does and then I can ask it questions about that to further my understanding. That is a massive leg up over the knowledge spaghetti approach...

I like the tldr pages to learn the most common features and use cases of new command line tools! I think it's great, albeit, a bit slow sometimes

tldr pages are a great idea, but the execution is a total fail. Looking at the rsync entry, it fails to provide the most blatantly common requirements:

I just needed two commands: one to mirror a folder from one drive to another, updating only the changes (excluding all of the hidden MacOS cruft). And another command to do a deep validation of the copy. These have to be two of the most commonly used commands right???

In the end, I felt that messing around with precious data without being 100% certain of what I am doing just wasn't worth it so I got a GUI app that was intuitive.

> There are a million Linux websites with the same versioning issues and inadequate explanations.

Where do you think the LLM is getting its data from? At least on the website you can see the surrounding discussion and have a chance of finding someone with the same problem as you, or learning something tangential which will help you further down the line.

> With an LLM, I can get it to tell me what each parameter it suggests actually does and then I can ask it questions about that to further my understanding.

If it’s giving you wrong flags, why do you assume the explanations it gives you are accurate? LLMs can make those up just as well.

What you should do is verify the given flags on the man page. Not only will it clarify if they exist, it will also clarify if they’re what you’re looking for, and will likely even point to other relevant options.

One pitfall is the LLM hallucinates, might sometimes seem to fulfill your requirements but it can subtly break down. The man pages could be used in conjunction to fact check your understanding.

> There are a million Linux websites with the same versioning issues and inadequate explanations.

So, instead you ask a magic robot to recite a fuzzily 'remembered' version of those websites?

Bear in mind that an LLM does not _know_ anything, and that, despite some recent marketing, they are not 'reasoning'.

Learn to read documentation. It's really a very important skill, and many people were becoming _somewhat_ deficient in it even before our good friends the magic robots arrived, due to Stackoverflow et al.

Bah! Coders need to learn to write documentation. The tldr for rsync was hilarious! Actually, this is one place where LLMs are currently useful! Instead of getting LLMs to write code, get it to write documentation.

Not the op, but I sometimes find the official documents hard to parse. Not looking at rsync in this case. On the other hand I have the same experience with LLMs as the op.

Big thanks to all the doc writers who include vignettes right in the documents.

I’m using “aichat”, and have all my man pages in a RAG. It’s far faster to query that than it is for me to read through it manually.

I guess you never used ffmpeg, there is a whole industry of "how to do X with ffmpeg"

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