[ghjfrdghibt]

Agree to disagree.

Don't see any difference with finding the answers on SO, or in textbooks, and having an AI provide the same.

And at the start, novice body builders will of course watch other body builders to learn how it's done.

Unless you're exceptional you're not teaching yourself anything unless it's by learning from others. Few are the pioneers in any field.

[rnewme]

How do they become pioneers? By digging into the body of knowledge. They know what books and authors are good, what blogs to read, they posted questions on SO. They don't search for direct answers, but instead they search for the knowledge that allowed the person who made the question to make the question, and person who found solutions to find the solution.

Looking how it's done doesn't equal you doing it. It's apples to oranges. OP was referring to needing to do work in the gym to get results. You didn't get results if you looked at others and did the same in the advent of code etc. You are merely entertaining yourself, but you are not competitive participant. With that approach you'll never be on top.

There are people who use frameworks and people who write frameworks. The first group struggles when there is no official documentation or tutorial on a topic they need. The second group when faced with the same goes through the source code and gets the answers.

Bottom line is the question of what you want to achieve - just go through the problems and be done with them, or deep dive into new topics ans material, to widen your knowledge?

[ghjfrdghibt]

I don't see much to disgree with in what you're saying. Were clearly talking about different things.

What happens when you dig in and exhaust all your best efforts and still don't find a solution? Are you a lost cause because you couldn't figure it out for yourself? Or are you allowed to be shown the way it's done so you can learn from that?

Many times in my life have I not been able to figure something out for myself, and needed shown how the thing was done. Just because I couldn't do it on my own doesn't mean I wasn't capable of either doing it once shown, or that by being shown I didn't learn anything.

[miningape]

Honestly use the gym analogy again:

You've spent the last hour trying to curl the 50kg dumbbell and you just can't do it. You walk up to the yolked out guy and ask him to show you how it's done, he picks up the weight and curls it with ease.

At this point its not really fair to say you curled those 50kgs, and you didn't get much out of the experience. Maybe you noticed something about his technique that helped, or he gave you some pointers, but you still can't lift the weight by yourself even with that information.

Now if you instead went back and trained some more at lower weights not only would you get more out of the experience (in terms of growth), but also seeing someone else do it is more beneficial since you can try it again yourself and directly apply what you just learned. Eventually with enough training at easier weights and progressing naturally you'll be able to lift the 50kg weights. But that one curl you're now getting to do for the noobie is in no way indicative of the time and effort you actually put in to be able to do that one curl.

Now if you're instead in a warehouse doing your job moving heavy boxes from A to B getting the yolked out guy to help you isn't that bad - sure you can't do it in the future but all that matters is that it was moved from A to B. If we take that same mindset into the gym we'll get nowhere since the gym isn't about moving something from A to B, it's about making you better at moving something from A to B.

[ghjfrdghibt]

I think this is where your analogy falls apart.

Sometimes being shown the answer to a problem is just what you need to move forward, especially if you are inexperienced. Shown the answer with an explanation as to how you get to it is better.

[miningape]

I think the difference between the textbooks and AI is that the AI can answer exactly your question without providing the necessary context/reasoning behind how it arrived there.

When you are drawing connections between SO posts, textbooks, whatever you do a fair amount of reasoning yourself.

Now that I think about it it isn't AI specific (more knowledge specific) - I'd say the same if you wait a few hours and then look up the AOC solutions on github. Sure you'll have "solved" the problem but you never spent the time to actually figure out the solution.

> And at the start, novice body builders will of course watch other body builders to learn how it's done.

"Learn how it's done" - not get bigger. This is the important difference. If those novice body builders watched others and learned how its done without putting in the reps themselves they'd get nowhere.

[ghjfrdghibt]

Say I have no idea how to complete day 12 of AoC. Racked my brains, done some searching, researched as best I can, can't find anything that makes sense. I'm stuck.

By your logic I would gain absolutely nothing, learn nothing, but either looking up the answer or getting AI to give me the answer. I don't accept that.

Reason being? I've been in the exact same situation. Guess what, I learned different approaches to the problem I could not solve. I improved and can now solve similar problems as a result. Is it cheating? Maybe. Do I care? No. Why? Because I'm not doing AoC for the struggle, I'm doing it for fun, and I know my limits too.