At least it’s easier to teach yourself anything now with an LLM? So maybe it balances out.
Learning comes from grinding and LLMs are the ultimate anti-intellectual-grind machines. Which is great for when you're not trying to learn a skill!
That's just one use though. The other is treating it like it's a jr developer, which has its own shift in thinking. Practice in writing details specs goes a long way here.
> Practice in writing details specs goes a long way here.
This is an additional asymmetric advantage to more senior engineers as they use these tools
Says who? While “grinding” is one way to learn something, asking AI for a detailed explanation and actually consuming that knowledge with the intent to learn (rather than just copy and pasting) is another way.
Yes, you should be on guard since a lot of what it says can be false, but it’s still a great tool to help you learn something. It doesn’t completely replace technical blogs, books, and hard earned experience, but let’s not pretend that LLMs, when used appropriately, don’t provide an educational benefit.
There is no learning by consumption (unfortunately, given how we mostly attempt to "educate" our youth).
I didn't say they don't or can't provide an educational benefit.
That's application. Then presumably you started deviating a little bit from exactly what the instructor was doing. Then you deviated more and more.
If you had the instructor just writing the code for every new deviation you wanted to build and you just had to mash the "Accept Edit" button, you would not have learned very effectively.
Consequence is you get a bunch of output that looks really good as long as you don't think about it (and they actively promotes not thinking about it) that you don't really understand, and that if you did dig into you'd realize is empty fluff or actively wrong.
It's worse than not learning, it's actively generating unthinking but palatable garbage that's the opposite of learning.