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I already imagine future devs wide-eyed saying things like: "He/She can _debug_!!"


I have a strong memory from the start of my career, when I had a job setting up Solaris systems and there was a whispered rumour that one of the senior admins could read core files. To the rest of us, they were just junk that the system created when a process crashed and that we had to find and delete to save disk space. In my mind I thought she could somehow open the files in an editor and "read" them, like something out of the Matrix. We had no idea that you could load them into a debugger which could parse them into something understandable.


I once showed a reasonably experienced infrastructure engineer how to use strace to diagnose some random hangs in an application, and it was like he had seen the face of God.


This reminded me of Asimov's short story "The Feeling of Power" https://hex.ooo/library/power.html


Thank you for that, what a fun read :D


I mean I already heard comments about myself when I went and RTFM'd

"You read manuals?!?"

"... Yeah? (pause) Wait, you don't?!?!?"


(Anecdote) Best job I ever had, I walked in and they were like "yeah, we don't have any training or anything like that", but we've got a fully setup lab and a rotating library of literature. <My Boss> "Yeah I'm not going to be around, but here are the office keys" don't blow up the company pretty much.


I don't really see the connection here, but it was a nice anecdote of a trusting environment.


To be honest, I do find most manuals (man pages) horrible to quickly get information how to do something and here LLMs do shine for me (as long as they don't mix up version numbers).


For man pages, you have to already know what you wants to do and just want information on how exactly to do it. They're not for learning about the domain. You don't read the find manual to learn the basics of filesystems.


I love manual pages, at least on/from OpenBSD.


Imagine reading in 2025, when you can just watch tiktok about it!

/s


Pretty much. The hesitancy to read documentation was there long before TikTok and LLMs.

"Teach me how to use Linux [but I hate reading documentation]".

It infuriated me.




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