Read the Docs

When you’re learning to use a new framework or library, simple uses of the software can be done just by copy pasting code from tutorials and tweaking them as necessary. But at some point, it’s a good idea to just slog through reading the docs from top-to-bottom, to get a full understanding of what is and is not possible in the software.

One of the big wins of AI coding is that LLMs know so many things from their pretraining. For extremely popular frameworks that occur prominently in the pretraining set, an LLM is likely to have memorized most aspects of how to use the framework. But for things that are not so common or beyond the knowledge cutoff, you will likely get a model that hallucinates things. Ideally, an agentic model would know to do a web search and find the docs it needs. However, Sonnet does not currently support web search, so you have to manually feed it documentation pages as needed. Fortunately, Cursor makes this very convenient: simply dropping a URL inside a chat message will include its contents for the LLM.

Examples

• I was trying to use the LLM to write some YAML that configured to call a Python function to do some evaluation. Initially, the model hallucinated how this hookup should work. After providing the manual as context the model understood how to fix the error and also updated the output format of its function to match the documentation guidance.