[caeril]

I've had the opposite experience. Not just google, but StackOverflow. Did these tools make me more "productive" in the immediate sense of closing feature request tickets? Sure, absolutely.

But these are all crutches for the mind. I don't know about you, but my capability and skill as a developer has only ever been improved by meeting dead-ends, and doing the cognitively demanding work of actually understanding the system I'm working on at a deep level, and deriving solutions myself.

Google, StackOverflow and the like have definitely improved raw feature delivery rates, but they have indisputably made me dumber and less skilled.

As for LLMs, I'm on the fence. I am using GPT-4 in some code generation utilities I've written to speed up mundane tasks, and I do not yet believe it impinges on my ability to learn, as these are just mundane tasks. But there's a good chance this will change if I ever get access to the 32K token model, or GPT-5, GPT-6, etc are released and will be much more capable.

[t43562]

I agree 100% that being given the answer is useless because then you haven't been forced to understand the problem.

I'm thinking of 2 special cases: 1) you can read manuals and get modules online. I lived in Africa in the days of 2400 modems and information was very hard to get - always in books which I could not buy. Now anyone in the world can get information so there's a way in which that allowed the software industry to expand but fortunately there was huge demand.

2) Bugs which other people have solved before - a particular error message from Anypoint Studio today was because I had run brew and I updated maven without realising it - past the version that Anypoint supports. Searching saved hours of frustration. When this works I think it's a true saving.