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Comment by Legend2440 | Hacker News Reader

I can get why they're mad about it, but the reality is that chatbots are better/easier to learn from than courses and tutorials.

If I had a question about a new library now, I wouldn't google for a tutorial, I'd just ask ChatGPT.

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This implies that you know which question to ask. If people don't know about accessibility, security etc. How are they able to learn? Also, most people don't use AI to learn but to do it for them.

I mean, the frontier models are pretty damn good at giving you all the standard conventions on things... The first question I usually ask is "give me the all the modern day conventions for this use-case", and then I start the context building from there. This applies to a lot of things, but I mainly use it when I am coding.

And yet I gave to spend considerable time getting Astra not to use useEffect for no good reason.

You can ask the AI what you don't know.

That's where books come in. Read them, explain what you're learning to the AI, and what interests you about it, ask for it to check your understanding. Explain your other interests, ask it to suggest other things to read which will bridge the gaps between what you're learning now and the other things you already know.

That's a good point, but if you have an always-on agent focused solely on helping you improve your knowledge/skills, it can ask you questions every day and gradually identify gaps in your knowledge and it gets really good at knowing where to push you.

I'm experimenting with exactly that: https://miletus.app

I think it's twofold, there are less people willing to learn the trade when most of it can and has been replaced by llms.

Learn from bots or get bots to do things?

Honestly both.

I suspect a lot of people who formerly might have been interested in a web dev tutorial now just an LLM to make them a website.

I'm still doing hybrid coding, half LLM half manually. But every new LLM does more and more of the job...

I constantly get dragged into web tech from tangential projects. I still found it valuable to take the time to learn Electron (and update my front end knowledge) properly to do a port of an Electron app for a slightly different context.

I used AI to extract the raw frontend structure of the app because I know I can't design to save my life. And I still need to tweak it quite a bit because the interface was always janky (a desktop app but content is overflowing everywhere, and it definitely can all fit in a typical full screen view). But the act of structuring that stuff into a modern framework and hooking up the logic will still come down to me.

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