Comment by jdw64

I don't think it's bad to manually retype code as a way of learning.

Isn't a working program itself the best textbook? It's just a difference in learning methods. Depending on Stack Overflow is also a dependency, and searching for code on GitHub is also a dependency. How much dependency you allow is purely a personal difference, and it varies depending on your own study habits and learning style. Whether your learning method is superior or not likely depends on how your brain works.

People tend to think that the more painful something is, the better it is.

I don't deny that there are talented people who can read the manual and build everything from scratch. But I think that analyzing and rebuilding a working template step by step is also valuable.

I agree with the view that LLMs may cause cognitive decline. But if you go down that path, Socrates already criticized writing for weakening human memory. And how did that turn out? Books became a universal medium for knowledge. Then the internet came along. When Stack Overflow appeared, there was opposition, but it also had explosive adoption. LLMs are just the next step in that sequence.

If there is cognitive decline, I think there's also compensation in other areas. Using LLMs clearly causes some cognitive decline. And I think there are areas that need to be reinforced to compensate.

But having a baseline to work from—modifying already-working code—is genuinely helpful. I don't see what's wrong with using that as a way to learn.