[jjice]

This argument has come up a lot since ChatGPT released. I can agree that new tools (like LLMs) can have a place in education, potentially. That said, learning the foundation of anything you do is critical to understanding the higher levels of it.

I think the same connection can be made to StackOverflow. If you are/were a computer science student and you did a lot of copy-pasting and not a lot of thinking and trialing, there's a really good change you didn't get to suffer mistakes during development that you know to avoid now as a graduate. Now, we all have taken advantage of code from StackOverflow and that's a tool to aid development for us, but when it's something you treat as a crutch, when it doesn't have the answers you need, you're screwed.

One case I saw literally yesterday at work. We had a dev that had written a lot of copy-pasted code saying that it couldn't be generalized and take advantage of a mapping we already have to generate a UI. This dev had not yet had the fortune of learning how to properly abstract this kind of problem in this specific circumstance. I sat down with him for a moment and instead of spitting out a bunch of nonsense that the LLM was trying to get him to write, we say down and paired on the issue until we had a more general solution.

He learned some abstraction concepts, we all got a better code base, and he learned a way to help tease an LLM into a better solution going forward. That foundation was required to get that better solution though, in this situation.

Generally speaking, I think you should know all your underlying concepts so you can audit any new development assisting tools.