[sorcerer-mar]

I think it's actually even worse: it's easier to trick yourself into thinking you're teaching yourself anything.

Learning comes from grinding and LLMs are the ultimate anti-intellectual-grind machines. Which is great for when you're not trying to learn a skill!

[andy99]

Even though I think most people know this deep down, I still don't think we actively realize how optimized LLMs are towards sounding good. It's the ultra processed food version of information consumption. People are super lazy (economical if you like) and rlhf et al have optimized LLM output to being easy to digest.

Consequence is you get a bunch of output that looks really good as long as you don't think about it (and they actively promotes not thinking about it) that you don't really understand, and that if you did dig into you'd realize is empty fluff or actively wrong.

It's worse than not learning, it's actively generating unthinking but palatable garbage that's the opposite of learning.

[jyounker]

Yeah, you have to be really careful about how you use LLMs. I've been finding it very useful to use them as teachers, or to use them in the same way that I'd use a coworker. "What's the idiomatic ways to write this python comprehension in javascript?" Or, "Hey, do you remember what you call it when..." And when I request these things I'll try to ask in the most generic way possible so that I then get retype the relevant code, filling in the blanks with my own values.

That's just one use though. The other is treating it like it's a jr developer, which has its own shift in thinking. Practice in writing details specs goes a long way here.

[sorcerer-mar]

100% agreed.

> Practice in writing details specs goes a long way here.

This is an additional asymmetric advantage to more senior engineers as they use these tools

[tnel77]

>>Learning comes from grinding

Says who? While “grinding” is one way to learn something, asking AI for a detailed explanation and actually consuming that knowledge with the intent to learn (rather than just copy and pasting) is another way.

Yes, you should be on guard since a lot of what it says can be false, but it’s still a great tool to help you learn something. It doesn’t completely replace technical blogs, books, and hard earned experience, but let’s not pretend that LLMs, when used appropriately, don’t provide an educational benefit.

[sorcerer-mar]

Pretty much all education research ever points to the act of actually applying knowledge, especially against variable cases, to be required to learn something.

There is no learning by consumption (unfortunately, given how we mostly attempt to "educate" our youth).

I didn't say they don't or can't provide an educational benefit.

[fullstackchris]

Some of the best software learning I ever had when I was starting out was following along with video courses and writing the code line by line along with the instructor... or does this not count as "consumption"?

[sorcerer-mar]

> I was... following along and writing the code line by line

That's application. Then presumably you started deviating a little bit from exactly what the instructor was doing. Then you deviated more and more.

If you had the instructor just writing the code for every new deviation you wanted to build and you just had to mash the "Accept Edit" button, you would not have learned very effectively.

[djeastm]

Sure, but easy in, easy out. Hard earned experience is worth soo much more than slick summaries of the last twenty years of blog articles.