Confession. I think I haven't read manpages since stackoverflow and certainly not since LLMs.
Perhaps the modern version of "man" should be a program you can talk to.
Please no. I want to read the manual without having to talk to anything.
It's called Claude. Or Gemini-cli. Or any other agent capable of running man.
"Hey <agent>, use `man` to help answer these questions about grep"
How do you think llms reply to you?
i have made llms read manpages, it is great lol
That may "answer" a specific question. And all llms can do as they include manpages in training data (and any Agentic thing can search) however the value in reading documentation is that one can find different angles by learning about different options, which allow tontackle problems from a different perspective. The answer to a question is constrained by assumptions which are part of the question.