I Prompted AI Hundreds of Times. The Documentation Fixed It in One Go.

As a developer in 2025, it almost feels illegal to struggle.
We’re surrounded by AI copilots, autocomplete, “explain this error” bots, StackOverflow threads from 2012, and a thousand tutorial videos saying “just follow these simple steps.”

So when I hit a React Native CLI issue last week, I did what every modern dev does.

I opened ChatGPT.

Then Cursor.

Then Claude.

Then my terminal.

Then ChatGPT again.

I wrote prompt after prompt, refining, rephrasing, simplifying and straight up dumping my entire project folder into an AI chat window.

After hundreds of prompts, I still didn’t have a working solution.
Errors kept changing shape. Gradle kept being Gradle.
And every time I asked AI “what now?”, it gave me an almost correct answer close enough to feel helpful but not close enough to fix the issue.

At some point, I had this moment of clarity:

“What if I… actually read the official documentation?”

Crazy idea, I know.

So I opened the React Native docs.

Within one page, I found the exact explanation of the issue.
Within three minutes, I fixed the entire thing.
No hallucinations. No missing steps. No outdated commands.
Just clean, direct, accurate information from the people who actually built the tool.

That’s when it hit me:
AI can:

1. explain concepts
2. generate examples
3. speed up coding
4. guide you through steps

But documentation:

1. is accurate
2. is up-to-date
3. matches the real tool versions
4. contains the reasoning behind decisions
5. tells you exactly what’s deprecated, removed, or required

Most importantly:
Docs tell you what you should do.
AI tells you what you might do.

And that difference?
That’s the gap between spending 3 days debugging vs 3 minutes understanding.

The Advice I’m Giving Every Developer Now
Before asking AI 50 questions, do this instead:

1. Open the official docs
2. Read the section about your tool or error
3. Understand why the problem exists
4. Then use AI to speed up the implementation

You’ll fix things faster, learn deeper and become the kind of engineer who doesn’t panic when something breaks.