RTFM: Still Good Advice

I remember looking for an answer to a question many years ago and seeing answers with four letters: RTFM. It irritated me when I saw this posted because it didn’t answer my question. This was back in the day when a certain programming language needed half a dozen XML files to run a web server that seemingly were many times blindly copied between projects. After enough provocation, I decided to cave only to see that it actually was the right answer. Read the manual. This is still quite relevant today but with several key differences.

We’re building more complex things, faster. AI is helping us work at an even higher level of abstraction. That’s genuinely useful. But there’s a problem: if you don’t know what to ask, the LLM isn’t going to necessarily get you there any quicker. I caught myself in this loop a few times. It took a few tries to understand a behaviour I was seeing from a module I was using was due to my lack of understanding of something more foundational that had changed between versions. An LLM can help me get there but I decided to take 30 minutes to read the documentation further and I was back on my way. I didn’t just find the answer, I learnt something more foundational. Doing this forced me to think further about a few other decisions I was making with what I was building.

Sometimes what you think is the question isn’t the right question at all. It’s just the surface of something deeper you didn’t know was there.

What are you trading in favour of speed? Sometimes it’s actually a deeper understanding of the fundamentals. Something that can make you fragile when the LLM is wrong and you can’t tell.

With today being World Book Day, I’m not recommending a book. I’m recommending a habit: when something actually matters to you, read the source. The documentation. The original paper. Not just the summary of the summary. I’m not saying this to slow you down, nor am I saying to not use tools to help you but learn to identify when you need to go deeper. In the long run it can help you move quicker.

The best signal-to-noise filter I’ve found isn’t necessarily a tool. It’s depth. When it’s apparent that you lack the depth in something that you need, read the manual.