For nearly as long as I can remember, I’ve been working on a bicycle. Sometimes I need to fix one. More often, I’m just tinkering, or taking on an unnecessary new project to pass the time. All the while, I’ve been looking to the internet for help, which has given me a chance to observe its changes from a fixed vantage point.

In the 90s and early 2000s, fixing a wheel might have meant finding and poring over websites published by obsessive mechanics or simply looking up manuals. A few years later, working on a suspension component might have involved looking at forums full of other hobbyists, either asking for help directly or reading threads about similar issues. Over time, search engines got better at finding just the reference page or the discussion I was looking for.

As the 2010s wore on though, that web — of sites and communities and forums built around shared interests — was supplanted by social media platforms, which were useful for plenty of things but not particularly well-suited to building archives of knowledge and reference material. Maybe you saw this in your hobby, too: The old websites started going dark, and the forums slowed down. Searching for help with a bike component still got me somewhere — maybe to a Reddit thread, or a Facebook group, or to an official company site — but while more people were posting about their messed-up bikes more than ever, their output was often diffuse, ephemeral, and trapped inside of one walled garden or another.

By 2020, YouTube had grown into the internet’s default how-to resource, filling the gap left by a decaying web. Mostly, this was a good development, in that I had access to thousands of show-and-tell instructional and troubleshooting videos posted by a familiar mix of experts and regular people. But it had its downsides: A process of searching for answers became, like the rest of the internet around it, a process of watching — of consuming video that was created to be helpful, but also sometimes to keep you watching as long as possible. Maybe the information about a torque value was buried nine minutes into a fifteen minute clip.

Starting in 2022, AI chatbots started offering a different option. At first, they weren’t much help, providing plausible-sounding answers that were often wrong. Then........

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