Comment by bad_username

Sounds like you didn't lose the ability, you lost motivation. Why learn Rust, you say, if an LLM can crank out a Rust app for me, and it will be good enough?

LLMs may have removed the critical need for a SW engineer to know details, like the syntax of Rust or the intricacies of its borrow checking semantics. But LLMs, I maintain, didn't remove the critical need for an engineer to learn _concepts_ and have a large, robust library of concepts in your head. Diverse, orthogonal concepts like data structures, security concerns, callbacks, recursion, event driven architecture, big O, cloud computing patterns, deadlocks, memory leaks, etc etc. As long as you are proficient with your concepts, you will easily catch up with the relevant details in any given situation. Once you've ever seen recursion, for example, you will find no trouble recognizing it in any language.

That's the beauty of LLMs : you don't _have_ to be good at technical details any more. But you still have to be very good with concepts, not just to be able to use LLMs properly, but also _be in control_ of their work. LLM slop is dangerous not because of incorrect details like bad syntax. It is dangerous because it misplaces concepts: it may use a list where you need a hash map and degrade performance, it may forget a security constraint and cause a data leak, or it can be specific where it needs to be general, etc. An engineer needs to know and check the concepts if they want to remain in control. (And you absolutely do want that.)

But it is impossible, or very impractical, to just learn an abstract concept out of thin air. The normal way to learn a concept is to see its concrete instantiation somewhere, in all its detailed glory, and then retain its abstract version in your head.

So, the only way to stay relevant and stay in control is to have a robust concept library in your mind. And the only way to get that is to immerse yourself in many real technical situations, the details of which you must crack first, but free to forget later. That is learning, and that is still important today in the age of LLMs.