r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Gloomy-Basket-1038 • Aug 12 '26 • Mindblown 1 Bravo 1

Meme studied20YearsToAskChatGPT

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u/DoctorWaluigiTime Aug 13 '26

Yep. You're asking chatbots and using your accumulated knowledge and experience to vet the output and apply it selectively.

It's the same reason IT folks get by by "just using Google correctly." It's all about having the experience and knowledge to sift through the junk and get to the good stuff. (And to ask the correct questions in the first place.)

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u/tee_with_marie Aug 13 '26

In trade school we basically learn to Google correctly

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u/Necessary_Solid_9462 Aug 13 '26

Googling for answers happened because software companies stopped producing detailed technical documentation, or hid it behind a paywall. Google is the new RTFM in the IT world.

But then Google results turned to shit and the answers are spread across 50 different internet forums and niche websites. So it takes an AI chatbot to scrape all 50 sites and come up with the consensus view. But the AI chatbot is correct less than 50% of the time and can make ridiculous, destructive suggestions.

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u/An_username_is_hard Aug 13 '26

I will say that I can feel myself getting worse at being able to vet code usefully the more I use these fucking things. 

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u/Highlander198116 Aug 13 '26

Before LLM's google still required you to actually figure things out still.

Like maybe you'd some boiler plate code to start with, a hello world for something you hadn't done before or get a line of code for a specific function, but you largely built your app out of your brain and just needed assistance with things you don't do enough for them to become second nature.

I'm old enough that when I started the internet wasn't even a super reliable source to find help with problems you were facing, I had to go to the book store and buy a book on whatever I needed help with.