I stopped reading the docs

I can't tell you the last time I opened a documentation site on purpose.

For twenty-five years, that was the job underneath the job. You wanted to use a new framework, you opened its docs, you read until the shape of it lived in your head. The migration guide. The gotchas buried in the changelog. The one config flag that ruins your afternoon if you miss it. I knew where the bodies were buried in a dozen stacks because I'd dug the graves myself.

Now I just ask. The model sits between me and every library I touch, and it already read the manual so I don't have to. I describe what I want, it hands back the incantation, and most of the time it's right. The leverage is hard to overstate. A framework I've never opened becomes productive in an afternoon.

And here is the part I keep turning over. I am getting fluent at asking and illiterate at knowing.

The other day I shipped something with a tool I could not have explained to you. It worked. The tests passed. But if you'd taken the model away and sat me in front of a blank file, I'd have been lost in a way I haven't been since I was twenty-two, copying examples I didn't understand off a forum.

There's a difference between using a thing and understanding it, and that gap is widening underneath me while the work gets easier on top.

I'm not going back to reading the docs. The trade is too good. But I'm watching the muscle I'm letting go soft, and asking which ones I actually need to keep. Some of them, I think, you don't get back.