You should abso-fucking-lutely use sources and cite them when trying to answer questions.

What is this macho bullshit of pretending like you have memorized all information you might ever need and looking something up is a sign of inadequacy?

And yes Claude or whatever is just another source, to be verified just like any other.

No one is saying to pretend you memorized everything. They’re saying they’d rather have an “I don’t know” than a half-assed ai response (or stack overflow cut and paste).

Or, if you get nerd-sniped by the question and spend some time figuring it out, that’s fine too.

But if you want to be helpful but don’t want to take the time to figure it out yourself, don’t just forward the question to AI or send me a link to the first result in Google because I could have done that myself(and may have done it already). Just say you don’t know, which is a paradoxically more useful response.