Isn't the struggle of sifting through a labyrinth of physical books and learning how and where to find the right answers part of the learning process?

I would argue a machine that short-circuits the process of getting stuck in obtuse books is actually harmful long term...

> learning how and where to find the answers part of the learning process?

Yes. And now you can ask the AI where the docs are.

The struggling is not the goal. And rest assured there are plenty of other things to struggle with.

I recall similar arguments being made against search engines: People who had built up a library of internal knowledge about where and how to find things didn't like that it had become so easy to search for resources.

The arguments were similar, too: What will you do if Google goes down? What if Google gives the wrong answer? What if you become dependent on Google? Yet I'm willing to bet that everyone reading this uses search engines as a tool to find what they need quickly on a daily basis.

The problem isn't that AI makes obtuse documentation usable. It's that it makes good documentation unread.

There's a lot of good documentation where you learn more about the context of how or why something is done a certain way.

No, trying stuff out is the valuable process. How I search for information changed (dramatically) in the last 20 years I've been programming. My intuition about how programs work is still relevant - you'll still see graybeards saying "there's a paper from 70s talking about that" for every "new" fad in programming, and they are usually right.

So if AI gets you iterating faster and testing your assumptions/hypothesis I would say that's a net win. If you're just begging it to solve the problem for you with different wording - then yeah you are reducing yourself to a shitty LLM proxy.

The naturally curious will remain naturally curious and be rewarded for it, everyone else will always take the shortest path offered to complete the task.

The thing is you need both. You need to have periods where you are reading through the docs learning random things and just expanding your knowledge, but the time to do that is not when you are trying to work out how to get a string into the right byte format and saved in the database as a blob (or whatever it is). Documentation has always has lots of different uses and the one that gets you answers to direct questions has improved a bit but its not really reliable yet so you are still going to have to check it.

I think if this were true, then individualized mastery learning wouldn't prove to be so effective

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning

No :)

Any task has “core difficulty” and “incidental difficulty”. Struggling with docs is incidental difficulty, it’s a tax on energy and focus.

Your argument is an argument against the use of Google or StackOverflow.

It really depends on what's being learned. For example, take writing scripts based on the AWS SDK. The APIs documentation is gigantic (and poorly designed, as it takes ages to load the documentation of each entry), and one uses only a tiny fraction of the APIs. I don't find "learning to find the right APIs" a valuable knowledge; rather, I find "learning to design a (small) program/script starting from a basic example" valuable, since I waste less time in menial tasks (ie. textual search).

The best part is when the AI just makes up the docs

Struggling with poorly organized docs seems entirely like incidental complexity to me. Good learning resources can be both faster and better pedagogically. (How good today's LLM-based chat tools are is a totally separate question.)

Why?

If you can just get to the answer immediately, what’s the value of the struggle?

Research isn’t time coding. So it’s not making the developer less familiar with the code base she’s responsible for. Which is the usual worry with AI.

Disagree. While documentation is often out of date, the threshold for maintaining it properly has been lowered, so your team should be doing everything it can to surface effective docs to devs and AIs looking for them. This, in turn, also lowers the barrier to writing good docs since your team's exposure to good docs increases.

If you read great books all the time, you will find yourself more skilled at identifying good versus bad writing.

Yes, it is. And yes, it absolutely is harmful.

Feel free to waste your time sifting through a dozen wrong answers. Meanwhile the rest of us can get the answers, absorb the right information quickly then move on to solving more problems.

1965: learning how to punch your own punch cards is part of the learning process

1995: struggling with docs and learning how and where to find the answers part of the learning process

2005: struggling with stackoverflow and learning how to find answers to questions that others have asked before quickly is part of the learning process

2015: using search to find answers is part of the learning process

2025: using AI to get answers is part of the learning process

...

If the docs are poorly written then your not learning anything except how to control frustration