Comment by tjr
1 day ago
AI only hurts learning if you let it. You can still use AI and learn effectively if you are thoughtful about the way you apply it.
I think that's very important.
Never mind six months; with AI, "you" can "build" something small and useful that works in six minutes. But "you" almost certainly didn't learn anything, and I think it's quite questionable if "you" "built" something.
I have found AI to be a great tool for learning, but I see it -- me, personally -- as a very slippery slope into not learning at all. It is so easy, so trivial, to produce a (seemingly accurate) answer to just about any question whatsoever, no matter how mundane or obscure, that I can really barely engage my own thinking at all.
On one hand, with the goal of obtaining an answer to a question quickly, it's awesome.
On the other hand, I feel like I have learned almost nothing at all. I got precisely, pinpointed down, the exact answer to the question I asked. Going through more traditional means of learning -- looking things up in books, searching web sites, reading tutorials, etc. -- I end up with my answer, but I also end up with more context, and a deeper+broader understanding of the overall problem space.
Can I get that with AI? You bet. And probably even better, in some respects. But I have to deliberately choose to. It's way too easy to just grab the exact answer I wanted and be on my way.
I feel like that is both good and bad. I don't want to be too dismissive of the good, but I also feel like it would be unwise to ignore the bad.
Whoa hey though, isn't this just exactly like books? Didn't, like, Plato and all them Greek cats centuries ago say that writing things down would ruin our brains, and what I'm claiming here is 100% the same thing? I don't think so. I see it as a matter of scale. It's a similar effect -- you probably do lose something (whether if it's valuable or not is debatable) when you choose to rely on written words rather than memorize. But it's tiny. With our modern AI tools, there is potential to lose out on much more. You can -- you don't have to, but you can -- do way more coasting, mentally. You can pretty much coast nonstop now.
> Never mind six months; with AI, "you" can "build" something small and useful that works in six minutes. But "you" almost certainly didn't learn anything, and I think it's quite questionable if "you" "built" something.
I think you learned something critically important: that the thing you wanted to build is feasible to build.
A lot of ideas people have are not possible to build. You can't prove a negative but you CAN prove a positive: seeing a version of the thing you want to exist running in front of you is a big leap forward from pondering if it could be built.
That's a useful thing to learn.
The other day, at brunch, I had Claude Code on my phone add webcam support (with pinch-to-zoom) to my https://tools.simonwillison.net/is-it-a-bird is-it-a-bird CLIP-in-your-browser app. I didn't even have to look at the code it wrote to learn that it's possible for Mobile Safari to render the webcam input in a box on the page (not full screen) and to have a rough pinch-to-zoom mechanism work - it's pixelated, not actual-camera-zoom, but for a CLIP app that's fine because the zoom is really just to try and exclude things from the image that aren't a potential bird.
(The prompts I used for this are quoted in the PR description: https://github.com/simonw/tools/pull/175)
> Can I get that with AI? You bet. And probably even better, in some respects. But I have to deliberately choose to. It's way too easy to just grab the exact answer I wanted and be on my way.
100% agree with that. You need a lot of self-discipline to learn effectively with AI. I'd argue you need self-discipline to learn via other means as well though.