this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2026
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The online communities are typically great. If you get really stuck, LLMs can be nice for dealing with your specific confusion.
Edit: ... but it's better to ask the community so others can benefit from the answer.
that's hilarious. I remember the scene back in the day was more like, "if you don't know, get fucked because nobody is going to be responsible for your incompetent bullshit."
oh how times have changed.
They have lots of snobbish gatekeeping still, it just exists at a higher level. Entry level knowledge is abundant. But once you seek a community with more specialized expertise, the IRC channels will be private and have passwords, and you better have contributed something to a novel exploit or something...
Please no. Absolutely not. LLM is absolutely not "nice for dealing with confusion" but the very opposite.
Please do consider people effort, articles, attributions, and actually learning and organizing your knowledge. Please do train your mind, and self-confidence.
You can't rely on LLMs to get actual answers for technical things but it can help avoid a huge amount of wasted time and effort, back-and-forth, going in circles, talking around or past the issues etc. that is seen in threads everywhere in these types of expert niche communities. Besides, maybe my question has already been answered.
When I don't know the specific terms or framing, am missing context or am trying to get from A to C, but have no idea that B even exists, nevermind how (or who) to ask about it. If I can accelerate the process of clearing that up, I can go to the correct human expert or community with a much better handle on what it is I'm actually looking for and how to ask for it.
You mention wasted time and effort, going in circles, talking past and around issues/questions, I think a lot of people underestimate that this is why people go to AI in the first place, because asking for help can be genuinely unbearable sometimes
Exactly, just look at the dropoff on stack overflow recently