It’s a question of time investment, fact checking is slower you than actually learning the material directly. So if you need to fact check every single thing you’re better off just leaning it in the first place.

In the original comment’s defense, sometimes you need to find where to start. For example: when writing a research paper, one might hastily cast a wide net before locating and drilling into a topic from a respected source.

I’m not well-versed in JavaScript (I’d like to be, but neither me nor my company have the resources right now to commit). When JS work comes up, I’ll often Google/ChatGPT to point me in a general direction before pulling up technical documentation on whatever comes back. I’m pretty good at learning, but sometimes it takes me a while to find out where to start.

I get where you’re coming from. However it’s easy to fall into the generalist trap where muddling through works well enough that you never spend the time to actually learn anything. It’s risky to really lean the details of a web framework which you may only use for a single 6 month project.

However, there’s a few things like SQL and JavaScrip that are likely to stick around mostly unchanged for your entire career. The risks are therefore much lower.

IMO, a reasonable heuristic is spend around 10% of the time you expect to work on technology in the next year actually learning the fundamentals until you feel comfortable. Often what looks like a major time sink goes away when you stop fumbling around.

Yeah, I have been learning some new topics lately, and GTP is actually very helpful in giving me the language I need to use start searching.

I'm not interested in starting at the beginning and learning a whole new language or API, I just want to get my task done, so I can ask GTP to get me started, then I can run the code it writes and start building tests and things to verify it works as expected.

This is how I use it as well. I don’t trust it, but find it more useful than Google these days for zeroing in on a topic.

Particularly with Google Search getting shittier and shittier with time.

It’s really too bad! I’d rather not be using AI as a search replacement, but I do feel like search results have degraded significantly.

>Why not? How did you find out things about basic terminology or concepts you're not familiar about before GPT?

Because if it tells me something that could just be found on google, I could have found it there first and not have to do as much fact checking. And if it tells me something I can't easily find, I can't tell if it's got some deep insight on harder to locate info, or if it's just made up.

ChatGPT gives you ideas and terms that you can google. That's often a rarity in a new language/framework.