Complicated multi-variable problems were never easy to Google.

Possible, if you were prepared to put some time in, but still not easy.

That you can explain several paragraphs of the details of a problem as a prompt and get a decent answer is a definitive upgrade.

I see the argument it will reduce peoples research abilities, but thats an education problem.

AI is really fast at searching forums though, can usually dig up posts better than I can. Doesn't help that AI slop has filled the internet making manual search harder

I do both, thing is I learned windows by myself clicking buttons but on linux i can't just guess the command lines

They really don't though, which is often the problem. How do I solve this weird esoteric problem, let me either dig through mountains of posts which are only tangentially related, or ask my local LLM to do it for me, implement a fix and move forward with it. Would I rely on it for production? Hell no. Would I do it rather then spending hours trying to find an answer? Absolutely. For things like that, it's like moving from chipping letters in stone to typing on a computer. They both get the job done, but one is certainly a better use of time.