alt Hacker NewsAgreed, there may be people working with their LLM tool to learn something new. In my experience this isn’t the way these tools are marketed, from where I sit it looks like this is being discouraged. If you aren’t really learning anything then all you get at the end is the product. For a certain type of person this is just not enough.
I bet people generated solutions end up significantly different from AI generated solutions. People learn more about the problem as they work it through and they don’t always end up with the thing they were imagining when they started.
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Someone on Twitter put it well: using an LLM to learn is like using a forklift to lift weights in the gym. Yes, action is happening but the point of going to the gym is not to ensure weights get displaced up and down.
> I bet people generated solutions end up significantly different from AI generated solutions. People learn more about the problem as they work it through and they don’t always end up with the thing they were imagining when they started.
Exactly!
And to be clear, you can learn a ton from LLMs. An expert teacher with infinite patience -- what an amazing thing. But there's a different kind of learning that only happens with practice, and that's what you don't get when a computer does the thinking.
Your brain is hardwired to find shortcuts. Once you have an LLM at your disposal, it'll be real hard to abstain from using it to do the hard bit.