Comment by GenshoTikamura
6 days ago
> My peers did not know them either and I had to wait sometimes days for the opportunity to ask someone advanced who knew. Blocking my progress.
Hypothetically, a solution to a problem that preoccupied you for days would translate into a more stable and long-lasting neuron configration in your brain (i.e. be remembered) than a solution to a problem that preoccupied you only for the time taken to type the prompt in.
That is somewhat true, figuring things out on my own makes me really understand something.
But I don't have the time and energy to figure everything out on my own and I stopped learning many things, where some useful hints in time likely would have kept the joy for me to master that topic.
So it is probably about the right balance.
There's definitely a balance. Someone told me years ago that when they'd look for one bug to try and fix it, they'd realize a bunch of other stuff about their code along the way. You learn a lot by struggling with a problem exactly when it feels unproductive. On the other hand, there are cases when maybe it's better to get an answer today than spend a week really learning something. For example if you don't care about how a library itself works, AI helps abstract the details away and maybe there really is no cost to that as long as you can see it works.