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"Don’t go to Stack Overflow, don’t ask the LLM, don’t guess, just go straight to the source. Oftentimes, it’s surprisingly accessible and well-written."
It has been, I think, close to 15+ years since I have been actively coding professionally. I am always learning. When I started my career I spent a fair bit of time answering questions on Stack Overflow rather than asking questions. That helped a lot as it felt like a "Real-World challenge" to solve someone else's problem. So it totally depends on how you use Stack Overflow.
With LLMs, I don't use it for "vibe coding" as the kids do these days. This is, IMHO, a wrong way to use LLMs. LLMs are great for integrations into software you are building where it has to analyze realtime events and produce summaries, or even for automating mundane things. But it definitely is not a replacement for a programmer. At least not in its current incarnation. The way to use LLMs is to ask it to provide a birds-eye/10,000 ft view on a topic you want to understand/explore. Why? Because sometimes, you don't even know how something works because you have no idea what it is called (technical terminology/jargon). That's where LLMs help. Once you know the terms/jargon, you can then refer to official documentation/papers rather than relying on the LLM. This IMHO is an underrated superpower of LLMs.
I developed a lot of my problem solving skills in semiconductor manufacturing where the cost of a bad assumption tends to be astronomical. You need to be able to determine exactly what the root cause is 100% of the time or everything goes to hell really fast. If there isn't a way to figure out the root cause, you now have 2 tickets to resolve.
I'll throw an entire contraption away the moment I determine it has accumulated some opacity that antagonizes root cause analysis. This is why I aggressively avoid use of non-vanilla technology stacks. You can certainly chase the rabbit over the fence into the 3rd party's GitHub repo, but I find the experience gets quite psychedelic as you transition between wildly varying project styles, motivations and scopes.
Being deeply correct nearly all of the time is probably the fastest way to build a reputation. The curve can be exponential over time with the range being the value of the problem you are entrusted with.
> Don’t Guess
I find that, when working with a new "thing," I often like to guess for about an hour or so before I really do a deep dive into the reference. Or, I'll read a stackoverflow answer or two, play around with it, and then go to reference.
Why?
Often there's a lot of context in the reference that only makes sense once I've had some hands-on time with whatever the reference is describing.
This is especially the case when learning a new language or API: I'll go through a tutorial / quickstart; "guess" at making a change; and then go back and read the reference with a better understanding of the context.
BTW: This is why I like languages and IDEs that support things like intellisense. It's great to be able to see little bits of documentation show up in my IDE to help me in my "guess" stage of learning.
That's how you can work against the normalization of deviance. Never dismiss new people commenting on what you may doing wrong for no reason. Yes, you've been doing X in an unusual way and no accident happened still; but there's a reason you should not do it this way and it may cost a lot to relearn it by experiencing it.
And same thing with old rules for which no one has an idea of why they exist but are still followed. Any rule should have an explanation for its existence and their relevance checked periodically.
It's a bit like math books. I dreaded reading formal math during my engineering -- always read accessible text. Got a little better in my master's and could read demse chapters which got to the point quickly. At least now I can appreciate why people write terse references, even Tutte books.
Some references are a pleasure to use. For rust crates, I always go to docs.rs and search there. It's just fantastic. i can search for a function that returns a particular type or accept a particular type etc. hoogle from Haskell was lovely too when I took a functional programming course in college. Cpp reference is also pretty good -- thanks for adding examples.
Today I was reading boto3 python library docs, and I immediately missed docs.rs!