No one is saying to pretend you memorized everything. They’re saying they’d rather have an “I don’t know” than a half-assed ai response (or stack overflow cut and paste).

Or, if you get nerd-sniped by the question and spend some time figuring it out, that’s fine too.

But if you want to be helpful but don’t want to take the time to figure it out yourself, don’t just forward the question to AI or send me a link to the first result in Google because I could have done that myself(and may have done it already). Just say you don’t know, which is a paradoxically more useful response.

Besides just not wanting to look insecure, there are good reasons to include sources, even in cases where you actually have the info memorized.

It shows someone where they can find that information for themselves in the future. That way they don't have to bug you later if they forget and it can give them a useful resource they can explore. If nothing else it demonstrates that at least one other person had the same understanding of something that I did which could be reassuring.