I usually just look into the docs, for most of the more basic things, search engine will find you the related function, and the docs usually have usage examples.

Also, learning to work with and read a documentation will be one of the best skills you can acquire as a programmer. I was so glad I was used to docs, because when I started to work with libraries that are under NDA (porting games on consoles, most prominently PS5), where the only resource you have are docs and internal forums without any kind of tutorials, being able to figure out what you need from docs is really nice skill to have.

I have tried using AI for non NDA programming questions, and usually I’ve ran into an issue that it simply just halucinates even on basic questions. For example, I was trying to figure out how to prevent Quest from sleeping, so we can run long-running automated tests, and all of the solutions were adb parameters that do not exist. Unless it’s something super basic, AI will probably just send to you the wrong direction.

ChatGPT or Claude. Just be aware that sometimes they’ll get things convincingly wrong. If you’re new to programming and asking simple questions then it should be relatively uncommon though.

Depends on your problem. Newer languages seem to have much better docs than in the old days, so languages like Rust, Go and Typescript seem very underrepresented by Stackoverflow activity compared to public Github activity.

Im a software developer and im not sure of another forum site to use and when I was learning my trade Stackoverflow was a hostile place full of arrogant people.

This will probably be downvoted cause LLMs bad, but our small company of 7 including owners have embraced LLMs. So I use CoPilot in Vidual Studio Professional and ChatGPT.

Now it should be understood that if you ask questions about software development it is going to: 100% correct, mostly correct but you need to refine it, or it’s just plain wrong.

I don’t know how useful it will be in learning and I guess it depends on how good you are right now, but as an experienced dev I have found it invaluable.

My boss who is the lead engineer and the smartest person I’ve ever met believes using LLMs has done the work of one employee for us, in terms of time saving and having less experienced devs like me use CoPilot means I am taking less of him time every day for problems I can’t quite solve. We do have some tools that utilize LLMs, for instance I can create a C# Model and our tool will go and create the schemas and a graphql layer and some basic views as we use a lot of boilerplate which is boring to keep writing out and a waste of time. We should be solving new problems not already solved ones.

Finally if you ever need any help or just want to ask a dev some questions about code or the industry in general, then reach out.

Edit: It is interesting to see this being downvoted and upvoted about evenly. Wish people would voice why they downvote. Like what are they downvoting exactly.

Most questions on stackoverflow are trivial. I assume those people now use llvms, as those are good enough for this kind of problem