alt Hacker Newsi don't know why you think it matters how it works internally. whether it changes its weights or not is not important. does it behave like a person who learns a thing? yes.
if i showed a human a codebase and asked them questions with good answers - yes i would say the human learned it. the analogy breaks at a point because of limited context but learning is a good enough word.
Maybe because I work on a legacy programming language with far less material in the training? For me it makes a difference because it partly needs to "learn" the language itself and have that in the context, along with codebase specific stuff. For something with the model already knowing the language and only needing codebase specific stuff it might feel different.