And then you read the docs and it turns out to be something you already tried.

But now it works.

The documentation is usually dog shit.

The corporate culture does not allow appropriate time for the documentation as it is considered something that cost money without a quantifiable gain.

It permeates in the FOSS space as well since writing good documentation is a skill and it is not fostered in corporations. So devs start great projects with terrible documentation.

Then you pick up the manual:

To use, start using. If you get an error, try again

I'm not sure there is a correct way to do this

The funniest thing to me is that any good manual would just say "DO NOT USE SOCKS AND FLIP FLOPS SIMULTANEOUSLY"

WTF is going on in panel 2? Did they cut a hole in the sock?

Then you look back at your notes a couple years later and you're like "I still don't understand wtf I did it that way".

It amazes me to see people do everything except 1) rtfm or 2) contact the support line that’s already paid for.

Edit: apparently my coworkers are in this thread.

Joke’s on you, the docs don’t exist or are so outdated that they don’t even compile

that does look less painful than reading documentation

"as viewed by the original dev who knows it inside and out"

That’s vibe coding.

I enjoy it more to figure out on my own. Kinda like disassembling stuff to see how it works and then put it back together. Reading the manual is like copying answers

Then the doc is so complicated that you spend hours reading stuff just to understand if the page is actually related or not. Then at some point you get bored try something randomly and it works.

The manual is probably outdated either way

I mean, thats how i learned to use a computer, was moms so the manual was gone by the time i used it anyway.

Now I get AI to summarize the documentation.

Did real people really wear slips with socks?

Tbf, often there either is no proper one, or you don't know where to find it. Or there is just tons to unpack, because one thing leads to another and suddenly you have to read like 10.

To give you an example: I just wanted to create a new btrfs software RAID and dissolve my old one, but without loosing the data or redundancy in the process. To do so, I had to create a new partition table, of course not before using tools to find the right device, add a LUKS2 partition, find its UUID, unlock that partition, add a btrfs partition, mount that partition, copy all data over, then generate a keyfile for auto-unlock, add that to the LUKS, add the according crypttab line, remove a drive from the former raid, not before running a balance of course, then also create LUKS on that, find the UUID again, open that as well, add the keyfile again, add another crypttab line, adding the mapper to the btrfs partition, running a balance that creates a RAID 10, adding an fstab entry for auto-mount, runnning dracut and set up btrfs maintenance.

Even just describing the process is a chore. Imagine trying to learn every stept, one by one, from the manuals.

Edit: Some fixes and steps I skipped added. In case anyone is wondering what the heck I'm doing: I am moving from a RAID 1 with 2 disks to an encrypted RAID 10 with eventually 4

And thereby learning more about what the program can do then the original dev even knew it could.

This is a weird picture of that important process though.

What a Loss