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Comment by lukan | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, I remember lots of stupid beginners questions I had, when learning to programm. My peers did not know them either and I had to wait sometimes days for the opportunity to ask someone advanced who knew. Blocking my progress.

(Asking online was a possibility, but instead of helpful answers, insults for being newb was the standard response)

With a LLM I would have had a likely correct answer immediately.

And yes, yes what if it is wrong?

Well, I was also taught plenty of wrong stuff from human teachers as well. I learned to think for myself. I doubt anyone decently smart who now grews up with those tools, think they are flawless.

In the end, you are responsible for the product. If it works, if it passes the tests, you succeeded. That did not change.

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When I was a beginner programmer, I was 13 years old. I remember noticing that one kid in our class managed to do and use things that no one else in our class did. I asked him how, and he said "it's built-in, I read about it right here" and pointed to the Java API docs.

Assuming you're literate, there's no age or skill level at which it's necessary to get stuck churning on beginner-level questions. The option to RTFM is always available, right from the start.

To this day, readiness to RTFM (along with RTDS: read the damn source) is the biggest factor I can identify in the technical competency of my peers.

So you say, you are a great autodidact. Good for you.

Well, I guess I am, too, but I still see great value in asking specific questions to competent persons.

Or don't you think asking teachers/instructors questions is helpful?

I can’t remember ever asking a question and getting a helpful answer to be completely honest..

I feel weird when I read about people needing support. Maybe there is something wrong with me.

To also be completely honest, either you have been really, really unlucky with your teachers, or you should improve on the way you ask questions.

I know I had mostly bad teachers and am largely a autodidact myself. But the few good teachers/instructors I had, were really helpful for my learning progress.

Yes, definitely. But I think reaching for an LLM can mean failing to build that reading muscle in the same way that leaning on teachers can. And I also think that many people never learn to read documentation not because they can't but because of a lack of willingness to try to learn to read specialized genres (of which technical documentation is just one).

A teacher can be a unique resource, but asking the teacher is often more of a reflexive shortcut than the thoughtful use of a unique resource.

I think use of LLMs (like StackOverflow before them) are more likely to discourage people from seriously or patiently reading documentation than they are to act as a stepping stone to a habit of more serious inquiry for most people.

> My peers did not know them either and I had to wait sometimes days for the opportunity to ask someone advanced who knew. Blocking my progress.

Hypothetically, a solution to a problem that preoccupied you for days would translate into a more stable and long-lasting neuron configration in your brain (i.e. be remembered) than a solution to a problem that preoccupied you only for the time taken to type the prompt in.

That is somewhat true, figuring things out on my own makes me really understand something.

But I don't have the time and energy to figure everything out on my own and I stopped learning many things, where some useful hints in time likely would have kept the joy for me to master that topic.

So it is probably about the right balance.

There's definitely a balance. Someone told me years ago that when they'd look for one bug to try and fix it, they'd realize a bunch of other stuff about their code along the way. You learn a lot by struggling with a problem exactly when it feels unproductive. On the other hand, there are cases when maybe it's better to get an answer today than spend a week really learning something. For example if you don't care about how a library itself works, AI helps abstract the details away and maybe there really is no cost to that as long as you can see it works.

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