Usually when people are asking questions it isn't that they don't know how to find a possible solution at all, it's that they don't feel they know enough to evaluate the correctness of the solutions they may find, and they think you do.

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Google will turn up plenty of sites with solutions to problems that are a bad way of going about it, and some that are actively detrimental/will make your problem worse - but sound plausible.

A LLM will potentially even take this a step further and present the same thing in glowingly confident terms. And will have chosen to ignore that the source it took it from was obviously questionable in reliability or had many comments below it disagreeing. Now, you can of course check into the sources, but that still just brings you back to the Google stage.

Discussing things with colleagues is also how you build collaborative networks. I'm trying to get out of the habit of searching for all information myself and engaging in more discussions with coworkers. I'm perfectly capable of searching information out myself. If I'm asking a question, it's a sign of respect, and shows that I am interested in the person's experience with the topic, and in nuance and context. I want to learn from them. If you offload the answer to AI, it's disrespectful to yourself more than anything--you don't even value your own expertise!

I just want them to tell me if they don't know.

It's the one question that AIs seem unable to answer correctly.

Saw this in a PR review yesterday. Reviewer made comments about the reasonableness of a solution and alternatives to consider. Submitter posted an LLM response that gives zero additional context about the PR. As the submitter, you should be the one with the context, not the reviewer, and having an LLM answer doesn't provide that additional context.

Maybe they already did and the answer was in some way lacking so they asked a peer.

Being mentored is infinitely better than a text box spitting out subtly wrong answers.

> Same argument can be used against you

That’s false equivalence and I think you know that.