That was never easy to find, Google was never good at finding tangential hints.

It absolutely used to be, it was a huge part of my workflow. You put in the framework/library and one or two related terms, and it would bring up pages of information. If you dug through that, maybe make the terms more general once or twice, you literally would find some random forum post that gives you exactly what you needed. Usually someone else who solved the problem, but occasionally it was just a little detail in something unrelated. Or sometimes there just really was nothing, now it’s all the time

Hell, you used to be able to paste the error directly with the project name and get that specific error through the stack and line numbers. Now, it just sees an error message and abstractes it into “any error message”. After the first few results, it’ll be random stack errors now also from completely different projects

And I have tried to use a local LLM to dig through results, the problem is the information no longer comes up. Between sites closing themselves off to prevent scraping and Google intentionally demolishing their search capabilities, that entire branch of development skill is just gone

It was a stark change, just around 2 years ago I noticed it happening, and it’s only gotten worse

At this point you really need an AI to read through the source if you don’t want to do it yourself

I guess you could contact the developers, but it’s generally faster to figure it out yourself, so I never got into the habit