alt Hacker News> People never really read documentation before.
The heck you talking about? How do you think we wrote software for the last 50 years?
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My absolute greatest skill in my career, that has consistently set me apart from my peers, is that I read documentation thoroughly.
It is shocking how much of a differentiator this is. You will discover that the software you’re already using is much more capable than you realized.
Copy past the example code, then tweak until it breaks? If we were meant to read documentation, not reading it would cause a compiler error!
when you start to internalize that these kinds of statements are an indication of how the average developer of the last 10-15 years operated the adoption rate of AI makes a lot more sense
A small percentage of engineers
Yeah lol it’s basically the only reliable way to know how things work. Pre-AI, I read documentation for libraries that I used almost every day.
And now with AI I’m using it to fact check Claude. And still reading it for myself to understand why other peoples code is written a certain way. It’s basically the most important thing to reference when coding.
Sure today Claude can just read the library code and tell you what a function does or how to do something. But it still won’t tell you why something is a certain way or won’t figure out specifically-designed usage patterns as reliably as the author telling you “this is an example of doing x”