Comment by twodave

I am beginning to disagree with this, or at least I am beginning to question its universal truth. For instance, there are so many times when "learning" is an exercise at attempting to apply wrong advice many times until something finally succeeds.

For instance, retrieving the absolute path an Angular app is running at in a way that is safe both on the client and in SSR contexts has a very clear answer, but there are a myriad of wrong ways people accomplish that task before they stumble upon the Location injectable.

In cases like the above, the LLM is often able to tell you not only the correct answer the first time (which means a lot less "noise" in the process trying to teach you wrong things) but also is often able to explain how the answer applies in a way that teaches me something I'd never have learned otherwise.

We have spent the last 3 decades refining what it means to "learn" into buckets that held a lot of truth as long as the search engine was our interface to learning (and before that, reading textbooks). Some of this rhetoric begins to sound like "seniority" at a union job or some similar form of gatekeeping.

That said, there are also absolutely times (and sometimes it's not always clear that a particular example is one of those times!!) when learning something the "long" way builds our long term/muscle memory or expands our understanding in a valuable way.

And this is where using LLMs is still a difficult choice for me. I think it's less difficult a choice for those with more experience, since we can more confidently distinguish between the two, but I no longer think learning/accomplishing things via the LLM is always a self-damaging route.