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ameliustoday at 11:05 AM5 repliesview on HN

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.


Replies

johannes1234321today at 2:04 PM

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.

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xigoitoday at 11:35 AM

Please no. I want to read the manual without having to talk to anything.

Normal_gaussiantoday at 12:41 PM

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"

LtWorftoday at 4:15 PM

How do you think llms reply to you?

nicman23today at 11:09 AM

i have made llms read manpages, it is great lol