I agree with this. It is an extremely powerful tool when used judiciously. I have always learned and sharpened my ideas best through critical dialog with others. (After two and a half thousand years it may be that we still don't have a better way of teaching than the one Socrates advocated.) But human attention is a scarce resource; even in my job, where I can reasonably ping people for a quick chat or a whiteboard session or fire off some slack messages, I don't want to do that too often. People are busy and you need to pick the right moment and make sure you're getting the most value from their precious time.

No such restriction on LLMs: Opus is available to talk to me day or night and I don't feel bad about sending it half-baked ideas (or about ghosting it half way through the discussion). And LLMs read with an attention to detail that almost no human has the time for; I can't think of anyone who has engaged with my writing quite this closely, with the one exception of my PhD advisor.

LLMs conversations are particularly good for topics outside work where I don't have an easily-available conversational partner at all. Areas of math I want to brush up on. Tricky topics in machine learning outside the scope of what I do in my job. Obscure topics in history or philosophy or aviation. And so on. I've learned so much in the last year this way.

But! It's is an art and it is quite easy to do it badly. You need to prompt the LLM to take a critical stance towards your ideas (in the current world of Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3, sycophancy isn't as much of a problem as it was, but LLMs still can be overly oriented to please). And you need to take a critical stance yourself. Interrogate its answers, and push it to clarify points that aren't obvious. Sometimes you learn something new, sometimes you expose fuzziness in the LLM's description (in which case it will usually give you the concept at a deeper level). Sometimes in the back-and-forth you realize you forgot to give it some critical piece of context, and when you do that it reframes the whole discussion.

I see plenty of examples of people just taking LLM's answers at face value like it's some kind of oracle (and I'm sure the comments here will contain many negative anecdotes like that). You can't do that; you need to engage and try and chip away at its position and come to some synthesis. The nice thing is the LLM won't mind having its ideas rigorously interrogated, which is something humans can be touchy about (though not always, and the most productive human collaborations are usually ones where both people can criticize each other's ideas freely).

For better or for worse, the people who will do best in this world are those with a rigorously critical mindset and an ability to communicate well, especially in writing. (If you're in college, consider throwing in a minor in philosophy or history alongside that CompSci major!) Those were already valuable skills, and they have even more leverage now.