But your brain was the clipboard. That simple process of transcription was something that you couldn't avoid learning from even if you wanted to. You'd notice the connections between the commands you typed and things that happened when you ran the program even if you weren't trying to.

Things would start to click, and then you'd have those moments of curiosity about how the program might behave differently if you adjusted one particular line of code or changed a parameter, and you'd try it, which would usually provoke the next moment of curiosity.

This was how many of us learned how to write code in the first place. Pasting the output from an LLM into your source tree bypasses that process entirely -- it's not the same thing at all.