For me at least I have to be able to believe I can understand any part of the stack if I want in reasonable effort. I would happily dive into semiconductor physics if I happen to want to (I'm a former physicist so the atom level I pretty much already learnt at school).

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cjkaminski 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Honest question: What is preventing you from understanding any part of the stack now?

You could potentially ask an LLM to explain it, but I would venture a guess that wouldn't feel like the right source to help you. You could use the LLM to help you identify source material written by humans in order to learn anything new. It doesn't have to "do all the work for you".

Modern AI systems are powerful. They are not omnipotent or omniscient. Understanding the details is still valuable, especially if you want to push the frontier of any known field.

In any event, the situation isn't hopeless. At least not yet. :)

	▲	RugnirViking an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> You could potentially ask an LLM to explain it You can ask frontier models with all the bells, whistles, language servers etc to give you every example of X. And it gives you 12 examples and says that's all of them. When you know damn well there are at least 40 (but not exactly how many). So you say no, you know it has missed some, such as X23, and X27. So it goes away and comes back again and says yes, there are 41 X, here they are. How much digging should you do to see if its right? I have many times gone looking myself to find that it has still missed some. Asked it to go check for those, to look harder it goes oopsie and says now im sure ive gotten all of them (has it?) All this to say, I have been burned, repeatedly, multiple times a day, for the last year+. I still use these tools, but I truly cannot understand how some people treat them as oracles that know everything about our codebases
	▲	cautiouscat an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> You could potentially ask an LLM to explain it, but I would venture a guess that wouldn't feel like the right source to help you. I don’t think this works, at least for me. Even on the 5.5 versions of Claude it’s still arduous to read at this point. > You could use the LLM to help you identify source material written by humans in order to learn anything new. It doesn't have to "do all the work for you". This probably depends on the shop, but humans aren’t writing docs anymore. That was the first thing to go, sadly.