Finding answers yourself
--help, man pages, and built-in help — the docs already on your machine, no agent required.
- Get usage for any command-line tool with --help and man
- Explore a language's objects with built-in help in the REPL
- Build the habit of checking local docs before reaching outward
Most of the documentation you need is already installed on your machine — no internet, no agent. Tools and languages ship their own reference, and reaching for it first makes you faster and independent. This is self-reliance at its most literal.
Command-line tools: --help and man
Nearly every command-line tool answers --help with a summary of what it does
and its options:
git --help
git commit --help
ls --helpFor deeper, manual-style documentation, man (manual) pages go further:
man ls
man git-commitInside man, scroll with the arrow keys, search by typing /word, and quit with
q. When you forget a flag, --help is almost always faster than a web search —
and it's the exact version installed on your system, not a possibly-outdated
article.
Languages: built-in help
Interpreted languages let you interrogate things live in the REPL. In Python:
help(str.split) # prints the reference entry, right there
dir(str) # lists everything you can do with a stringIn a browser console, console.log(Object.keys(somevalue)) and MDN's reference
serve a similar role for JavaScript. The point is the same: the language can
describe itself.
When the agent's away: --help, man, and help() mean you're never
stuck just because you can't ask an assistant. The authoritative answer is one
command away, on the machine in front of you — and it matches your installed
version exactly.
Check local first
A good order of operations: try --help/man/help() first, then the official
online docs, and only then a search engine or an agent. Local docs are fast,
exact, and always available. Build the reflex.
Where to go next
When you do go online, the skill is asking well and judging what you find. Next: searching effectively — and verifying the answers.