Comment by shireham

Author 17, me 31. Having AI write your physics code by telling it what to do is a relatively poor way to learn either physics or code, but I agree there are ways to use AI to learn things - just not necessarily this particular way here.

The main thing is the author did normal research and then gave it to AI to make it happen and verified it seemed to match what they asked for. In that, AI helps build the demo but it's not really adding anything to the understanding of the physics than reading about it in the first place did (akin to reading a post of someone else doing something, reviewing their code, and putting it in your project rather than trying to work with the new ideas yourself). Similarly, having AI write 90% of the code is not really helping you get familiar with the code any more than telling it which physics formulas to implement helps you get more familiar with the formulas.

OTOH, asking AI to help validate your research and understanding before going in to write the code helps you learn things like "the rocket shouldn't be flying right at takeoff just because the planet is spinning". Having AI help debug code issues you can't figure out in the code you wrote yourself (but not having it fix them for you directly) helps you really test 100% of the understanding you're trying to demonstrate instead of testing if you can say another's implementation seems reasonable.

If the only goal is to get to generate output instead of learn, then the calculus of course changes. E.g. yesterday I wanted to run an optical flow method for heart rate posted here in my browser. I wasn't really seeking to learn about it, I just didn't have python set up on my machine with the good webcam and wanted to play with the author's demo live. So I copied the article into AI and told it to make it into a single page HTML app. I didn't learn much of anything more than the article already covered in doing so, however I did achieve my goal of having some output to mess with instead of learning.

He is 17