It's surprising how much knowledge is not easily googleable and can only unearched by deep diving into OSS or asking an expert. I recently was debugging a rather naive gstreamer issue where I was seeing a delay in the processing. ChatGPT, Claude and Google were all unhelpful. I spend the next couple days reading the source code, found my answer, and thought it was a bug.
Asked the mailing list, and my problem was solved in 10 seconds by someone who could identify the exact parameter that was missing (and IMO, required some architecture knowledge on how gstreamer worked - and why the unrelatedly named parameter would fix it). The most difficult problems fall into this camp - I don't usually find myself reaching for LLMs when the problem is trivial unless it involves a mountain of boilerplate.
Asked the mailing list, and my problem was solved in 10 seconds by someone who could identify the exact parameter that was missing (and IMO, required some architecture knowledge on how gstreamer worked - and why the unrelatedly named parameter would fix it). The most difficult problems fall into this camp - I don't usually find myself reaching for LLMs when the problem is trivial unless it involves a mountain of boilerplate.