Comment by simonw

> 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.