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Comment by vova_hn2 | Hacker News Reader

For me personally, most of skills that I managed to acquire (including coding) came from satisfying my curiosity and messing around with things to see how they work.

So, I don't think that struggle-based learning is the only way of learning or even the most efficient way of learning.

I think that this idea is more of a social ritual, than an actually useful method.

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Curious and fun intellectual exploration is my modus operandi too, but there is something to be said about struggling for weeks on a single idea and experiencing an Aha! moment which surely elevates your intellect in a way fun exploration does not.

I found a spectrum - starting from copying and not understanding things through to fully internalising them.

One can travel from one end to the other.

I'm not sure what do you mean by copying.

I was talking about being curious, how something works and figuring it out and being curious why something is done one way and not the other and figuring it out.

The “figuring out” is the struggle IMHO. I don’t know if struggle is the perfect term but that’s the part that IS the active learning. Doing a query and getting the response is very passive and not engaging. Trying to actively understand how the thing work is the process of learning that is slowly being replaced by AI. As the author says, it is pretty hard to continue to do that process when you know you could just query Claude and have something. But something is lost here, you didn’t actually acquire the knowledge to the same extent. In the worst case you learnt nothing.

You can implement a full HTTP server from scratch without learning one bit of the HTTP spec by just asking the AI tool you’re using to correct itself until tests pass. At the end you have an HTTP server, you didn’t grow doing so.

HN front page has a story about Bun being rewritten to Rust. How much of rust did the author of that PR learn by doing that process? I would say very little. If they were doing that process without AI they would very likely be Rust expert once done given the complexity and size of the codebase

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