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Re:Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive? by AlexTrask on Saturday March 25, 2023 @04:28AM (#35300628)
My advice to learn programming is to avoid shortcuts and do the hard things like read the documentation
Re:Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive? by tasuki on Saturday March 25, 2023 @04:51AM (#35300772)
I don't think they were asking for advice.

The way dosco189 is using GPT is perfectly fine. They aren't letting GPT do all the work for them, they're letting it explain how concepts relate to each other, something you often will not find in the documentation.

Re:Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive? by hughesjj on Saturday March 25, 2023 @05:08AM (#35300861)
Bro documentation is notoriously terrible in almost all spaces.

Gpt3.5 is like super Google, and gpt-4 is like a polymath in everything intern. Learning has never been easier for me, I'm stoked.

Re:Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive? by barrenko on Saturday March 25, 2023 @07:22AM (#35301572)
Also documentation is, how to say, heavily styled in a sense.

If you disliked a certain teaching style before you were basically screwed. I've learned some languages purely because the documentation was fun for me personally.

Re:Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive? by Sai_ on Saturday March 25, 2023 @03:17PM (#35306071)
100% agree. Back circa 2010-2011, Apple’s obj-c documentation held back my iOS coding career. Coming from javadocs, I just couldn’t wrap my head around apple’s style.
Re:Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive? by baq on Saturday March 25, 2023 @05:20AM (#35300924)
This absolutely isn’t how humans learn. Humans learn by doing. Once you grasp the basics, you can read some documentation. Otherwise there’s not enough ground for the docs to make sense.

Once you’re comfortable with the basics by all means read the table of contents to know what you don’t know. I recommend this especially when dealing with databases, it’s amazing how many people never advance past the apprenticeship part of learning software engineering.

Re:Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive? by orbital-decay on Saturday March 25, 2023 @06:47AM (#35301365)
> This absolutely isn’t how humans learn. Humans learn by doing.

That depends on both the subject and the person. Some learn better by understanding the fundamentals first. Some subjects (in CS/SE as well) might not even be approachable without it.