Googling the solution yourself can honestly be such a pain in the ass for some problems. Search engines have become so shite. You’ll find some stack overflow question from 8 years ago that’s no longer relevant, and in the end you might have to consult documentation directly which can take many minutes or hours. I reaaaally hate to say it but LLMs are actually useful for this usecase
Oh and the man pages of terminal commands. Usually it feels like those were written for the people who already know all about the command, but simply forgot which flag does what. Like, was that -n or -t again? Oh, let’s check the man pages. Got it, it’s -n, so let’s go with that.
What about those who have never used that command before? I feel like the man pages are the wrong place for people like that. You could spend 20 minutes reading and get very little value out of it. Instead, you could spend 2 minutes reading a tutorial blog, adapt the command to your use and get on with your life.
Alternatively, you could ask an LLM to generate a command that does what you want and… hope for the best. Hallucinations do exist. However, I’ve also discovered some awesome commands this way. In simple cases, it’s surprisingly fast. In complex cases, you’ll find yourself on a wild goose chase again.
Google’s quality has been nosediving for years. I don’t use it for searches any more because it’s practically useless. I hear Kagi is good, but it is a paid service.
Googling the solution yourself can honestly be such a pain in the ass for some problems. Search engines have become so shite. You’ll find some stack overflow question from 8 years ago that’s no longer relevant, and in the end you might have to consult documentation directly which can take many minutes or hours. I reaaaally hate to say it but LLMs are actually useful for this usecase
Oh and the man pages of terminal commands. Usually it feels like those were written for the people who already know all about the command, but simply forgot which flag does what. Like, was that -n or -t again? Oh, let’s check the man pages. Got it, it’s -n, so let’s go with that.
What about those who have never used that command before? I feel like the man pages are the wrong place for people like that. You could spend 20 minutes reading and get very little value out of it. Instead, you could spend 2 minutes reading a tutorial blog, adapt the command to your use and get on with your life.
Alternatively, you could ask an LLM to generate a command that does what you want and… hope for the best. Hallucinations do exist. However, I’ve also discovered some awesome commands this way. In simple cases, it’s surprisingly fast. In complex cases, you’ll find yourself on a wild goose chase again.
omg this. The convention should be to have at least the first page be a quick introduction with examples of the most common commands.
LOL, that would put a lot of linux bloggers out of business.
Google’s quality has been nosediving for years. I don’t use it for searches any more because it’s practically useless. I hear Kagi is good, but it is a paid service.