[lsedgwick]

I think the right context for thinking about the quoted advice is for a person's education. If true beginners didn't ever handwrite a recursion algorithm, a list sorting algorithm, a CRUD application, an assembly interpreter, a neural net forward pass, etc., because they copied the code from an LLM, would they benefit from that? And if it's true for beginners, is there ever a point in one's learning journey where it stops being true and we don't have to learn or practice anything anymore which can be solved by an LLM, or never have to understand new concepts and tools even though the LLM can work with those concepts and tools for us?

I think there's a both-and answer for the contest. Maybe have one competition where the unenforceable spirit of it is, don't use LLMs for help, and another one where the challenges are just made... quite harder... so that even people who use the LLMs still need to marshal great ingenuity to use them better than others (e.g. the #1 spot is someone who used RAG and chain-of-thought better than the #2 spot, and also had better intuition of what to trust vs challenge from the LLM outputs).