Wait until you waste days down a hallucination-induced LLM rabbit hole.
> most of us would have never gotten by with literally just a library catalog and encyclopedia.
I meant the opposite, perhaps I phrased it poorly. Back in the day we would get by and learn new shit by looking for books on the topic and reading them (they have useful indices and tables of contents to zero in on what you need and not have to read the entire book). An encyclopedia was (is? Wikipedia anyone?) a good way to get an overview of a topic and the basics before diving into a more specialized book.