I still retained the 10000 foot view, and that mechanical sympathy has definitely helped me with fixing supposedly intractable performance issues with some regularity.

Like a lot of things in education, there's an important distinction between learning something to use it, and learning it to appreciate or inform what you do with what we have now.

Similarly there are processes we try to deploy 24/7 at work that I think would be better off being done for four weeks twice a year just to knock the cobwebs off of how we perform the job the rest of the year.

So was Ptolemy's model of the solar system.

That doesn't make it right or valuable.

The analogy you're making between reading, writing, and debugging your own code versus copy-pasting someone else's is a good one, but it's not a direct comparison to AI-assisted coding. When you copy-paste someone else's code, you're still reading and understanding the code, even if you're not writing it yourself. You're still learning from it, even if it's not through the process of writing it.

With AI-assisted coding, the issue is that the AI is generating code that you may not fully understand, and you're not necessarily learning from it in the same way. You're not reading and understanding the code, you're just accepting it as a solution. And that's where the problem lies.

It's not about whether AI-assisted coding is good or bad, it's about how it's being used. If you're using it as a tool to help you learn and understand the code, then that's one thing. But if you're using it as a crutch to avoid learning and understanding the code, then that's a problem.

So, to answer your question, I think it's more likely that copy-pasting someone else's code would result in you retaining information and learning, simply because you're still reading and understanding the code, even if you're not writing it yourself. But that's not the same as AI-assisted coding, where the AI is generating code that you may not fully understand.