The realization has been around for a while, but the reality of the paradigm shift should now be clear even to the most obtuse of geeks, such as myself.

Who uses manuals anymore?

Gone are the days and hours of groveling through the system documentation looking for that nugget of information that will help understand the latest obscure change to your favorite system. You are groveling not because you want to, or because you have infinite spare time to oborb more arcane system features, but because your favorite system insists that some feature in your decade old project has now the much feared DEPRECATED label on it, and you HAVE TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

But that has changed a couple of times.

For a while now - you can ask your favorite LLM some leading questions, such as what the heck is the new feature and how do I get from my old implementation to the new one? And as a result one doesn’t have to grovel through the documentation quite as much.

But the second change, and this is my epiphany, is that I can ask Claude Opus 4.5 to just do the change for me as I sit back and manage it.

The tipping point for me occurred today - as I dared to ask Claude Opus CLI to do the conversion from “.gradle” files to “.kts” type build instructions. This includes the dreaded (at least by me) conversion of the dependency list into the “libs.versions.toml” format. My thinking today is that this format was designed by a computer language type in some sort of strange way. So of course I asked an LLM. My Claude acount is of course used up until 4PM today, so I filled in asking ChatGPT. It suggests that “libs.versions.toml” is:

❌ Not designed to torment humans

❌ Not designed purely for algorithms

✅ Designed for human teams + tooling

⚠️ Individually unpleasant without IDEs or AI help

But now I don’t really care. As ChatGPT noted, the file syntax is just fine for LLMs. And that takes the torment out of the picture.

And gives me hope. The 12 days of Claude Opus CLI experience suggests there is a way to ride this paradigm shift and try to stay “above the API” as explained so well, and scarily, by Peter Reinhardt in his 2015 essay “Replacing Middle Management with APIs”.

Closing note

Of course I had Claude help me with this post. But basically I wrote it and Claude helped me manage the Blog mechanics and changes. And I asked Gemini to review it to keep things a bit independent. And Gemini asked the relevant question:

What is the new manual?

The old manual has passed away. Examining the case for a new manual will have to wait for the next blog post.

RTFM in intensive care Image generated by Google Gemini