Instead I pop by ChatGPT and ask it what I need done, the tools I'm using and let it write me an answer that I double-check to see if it matches what I'm looking for. It's definitely saved me a lot of time, I still go read the documentation but I have a much narrower point to start from.
I would never just copy-paste whatever it spits out, I don't trust it to generate code nor will I ever trust it to be fed with intellectual property in the prompt (mine or my employer's) but as a general assist for techniques and tools that I've been familiar with, and which could require some researching I do think it has pretty good value.
For example: If you’re an expert in language A, and you want to do something common in A in language B, you can ask GPT to show you the idiomatic way of doing it in B and it will usually lead you down the right path (or tell you it’s not possible).
"Learning something new" from LLMs is like trying to learn something new from a con artist. Sure, they might actually tell you the truth, but having little knowledge of something is exactly the worst possible state to be in while trying to figure out what's true and what's hallucinated.
So then I just forward that back to the model, or in the very worst case use my own brain to fix the problem the LLM generated.
In either case, I'm still better off than had the LLM not existed, because even an incorrect solution is closer to the correct solution than nothing at all.
I now have something that's close to solving my problem that I wouldn't have been able to come up with solely on my own. It just needs a little tweaking to be correct, which I can muster my way through with a little help from the LLM or Google.
However, those are indeed trivial. What's not trivial is not using APIs that exist for your particular problem; using obsolete patterns; not recognising that a particular approach is a dead end; not recognising potential future problems. All those problems fall in the same bucket of not knowing what you don't know, yet having a (seemingly fine) solution, which is worse than not having a solution, because that would force you to go and figure things out yourself (presumably reading recent documentation, etc).
I recognise that some people approached programming in the same way before LLMs, copying stuff from SO and adjusting till it works without ever understanding what they're doing. I guess LLMs can be seen as a neat extension of that "learning style" (which btw is precisely what OP warns against), but it does seem somewhat dysfunctional.
I've just spent the month of August learning to use Godot 4.0 with C#. Resources for this topic on the internet are scarce, Google only wants to show me the official Godot documentation and YouTube videos (which I don't watch because I don't like to learn in this way).
Sure, I could spend my time reading the official docs cover to cover, but I much prefer to get my hands dirty. I'm not a novice game programmer, I've written my own game engines, used Unity and published games. I've got the underlying knowledge of how Godot might work, but I'm unclear as to how to accomplish specific goals I'm trying to achieve.
And absolutely, I could just put everything into Google, and probably find correct documentation for what I need. Or I could just write "// Interpolate from current position to camera" and have Copilot spit out "transform3d.interpolate_with" along with supporting code specific to the code I have right here, which also references functions I don't even know existed. This way, I'm learning the "API landscape" in a sense.
Godot 4.0 is new enough (and C# used with Godot used so infrequently in online resoures) to the point where Copilot literally can not produce the correct output basically ever. The API changed and everything it outputs is subtly incorrect, either generating code that is now obsolete, or that the code it's generating no longer functions because of the API change.
When this happens, I just dive into the docs as a backup strategy. But never as my first choice.
Is this worse than not having Copilot? I don't think so, but it seems like we probably won't agree on that. I still feel like I've 'learned' Godot (I at least know more now than I did on August 1st). I'm able to synthesize the code more easily on my own thanks to the starting points provided by the LLM. And I'm also writing tutorials on how to use Godot, further solidifying the things the LLM showed me in my own mind.
I'm not saying LLM's are a "one stop shop" for learning. I'm just saying it's another tool. One that I think is a little shortsighted to just completely disregard because it's sometimes incorrect.
Usually you notice it's broken because it doesn't work.
There may be some advice that seems to work, but has subtle issues. (For example, race conditions.) Having more experience can help in spotting these problems.
Either way, copying code blindly isn't a good idea. In a professional situation, better testing and code review can help.
Just make a mental experiment and imagine that every comment here praising LLM coding skills is actually about copypasting stuff from SO. Does it not seem alarming to you?
Similarly for searching the Internet. Internet searches are potentially dangerous if you can't tell good answers from bad. But if you treat it as a source of hints that you need to verify yourself, it's a pretty good source of hints.
Many of us have learned quite well that LLM's are unreliable. Someone posts about the problem whenever it comes up. It's something close to conventional wisdom.
It's still surprising the first time you see it hallucinate, though. You have to see it for yourself. Once you've seen it a few times, it isn't so convincing anymore.
I also use for quickly writing tiny programs to isolate and test a specific piece of functionality.