I'm tackling projects solo I never would have even attempted before but I could see people getting bad results and giving up.
This is a truism and, I believe, is at the core of the disagreement on how useful AI tools are. Some people keep talking about outlier success. Other people are unimpressed with the performance in ordinary tasks, which seem to take longer because of back-and-forth prompting.
IOW, can you redo it by yourself? If you can't then you did not learn it.
Knowing the abstract steps and tripwires yes, but details will always have to be looked up. If just not to miss any new developments.
Well, yes it is; you can't very well claim to have learned something if you are unable to do it.
I get that point, but the original post I replied to didn't say "Hey, I know have $THING set up when I never had it before", he said "I learned to do $THING", which is a whole different assertion.
I'm not contending the assertion that he now has a thing he did not have before, I'm contending the assertion that he has learned something.