this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2026
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Better question is, when did you lose basic keyword-based searching skills? I know you may want your answers on a platter but realize that there's value in manual searches. Searching for something with LLMs on the page that you're on is questionable on so many levels.
There's really not value in doing something harder, and if it was a one page thing that wouldn't be an issue.
Using their example you could get an LLM to return you the correct page in some documentation, searching through an entire site based only on a concept of what feature set you're looking for. Ctrl-F cannot do that.
It's not harder, though, it's actually quite instant if you know what you're doing. A lot of documentation is literally one single web page, and the majority that is not can be navigated with the regular search and ctrl+F just fine.
There's no substitute to taking 40 minutes to get acquainted with the documentation to know what you need rather than trial & error your way through a problem blindly.
It's unreliable and prone to errors, and I say that after using LLM-based searches for months at work. Too many times it confuses areas, makes stuff up, or cites some irrelevant page just to give any answer at all.
Than you’re doing it wrong, I use it for similar things and find it far better than previous methods and I’ve been doing this shit for 20 years now.
There’s a reason why so many people are using it, it’s an extremely useful tool in some applications. It’s not perfect, but it saves a lot of time.
How can I possibly be doing it wrong when the page it's citing mentions nothing of what it's taking about, or when it tells me to do something that we as a company do not do?
Welcome to the club.
Sure, for writing letters but not for searching which is what I'm taking about.
Because I go to the fucking cited page, I don’t rely on the LLM to give me the answer. It’s not different to using Wikipedia.
Writing letters is the worst use for it, it’s not good for creative works.
So why are you assuming that I do, again? Aren't I the one telling you that I do manual searches precisely because the search function is so hit or miss?
What creative work? This is basic communication that we carefully outline first and then feed it to the LLM to spit out the same thing in formal language. Lol
You do not have access to a secret LLM that doesn’t introduce errors. You either don’t notice them or dismiss them.
They introduce errors, hence why I get it to give me to the page on the source material to verify it myself.
You could have just gone to the page without asking daddy Copilot how to do it 🤷♂️
And once again, we’re back to the issue of natural language search not being a feature of ctrl-f.