The hidden assumption here is that "learning programming" means replicating the author’s path: deep curiosity, lots of time, comfort asking humans, decent reading stamina. For people who already have those traits, yeah, you absolutely don’t need LLMs. But that’s a bit like a strong reader in 1995 saying "you don’t need Google to learn anything, the library is enough" - technically true, but it misses what changes when friction drops.

What LLMs do is collapse the activation energy. They don’t replace the hard work, they make it more likely you’ll start and keep going long enough for the hard work to kick in. The first 20 confusing hours are where most people bounce: you can’t even formulate a useful question for a human, you don’t know the right terms, and you feel dumb. A tool that will patiently respond to "uhh, why is this red squiggly under my thing" at 1am, 200 times in a row, is not a shortcut to mastery, it’s scaffolding to reach the point where genuine learning is even possible.

The "you won’t retain it if an LLM explains it" argument is about how people use the tool, not what the tool is. You also don’t retain it if you copy-paste Stack Overflow, or skim blog posts until something compiles. People have been doing that long before GPT. The deep understanding still comes from struggle, debugging, building mental models. An LLM can either be a summarization crutch or a Socratic tutor that keeps pushing you one step past where you are, depending on how you interact with it.

And "just talk to people" is good advice if you’re already inside the social graph of programmers, speak the language, and aren’t terrified of looking stupid. But the "nothing is sacred, everyone is eager to help" culture is unevenly distributed. For someone in the wrong geography, wrong time zone, wrong background, with no colleagues or meetups, LLMs are often the first non-judgmental contact with the field. Maybe after a few months of that, they’ll finally feel confident enough to show up in a Discord, or ask a maintainer a question.

There’s no royal road, agreed. But historically we’ve underestimated how much of the "road" was actually just gate friction: social anxiety, jargon, bad docs, hostile forums. LLMs don’t magically install kung-fu in your brain, but they do quietly remove a lot of that friction. For some people, that’s the difference between "never starts" and "actually learns the hard way."