[Capricorn2481]

> These kinds of messages read to me like people with superiority complexes. We get that you don't need AI to help you write a letter. For the rest of us, it allows us to improve our writing, can be a creative partner, can help us express our own ideas

The writing is the ideas. You cannot be full of yourself enough to think you can write a two second prompt and get back "Your idea" in a more fleshed out form. Your idea was to have someone/something else do it for you.

There are contexts where that's fine, and you list some of them, but they are not as broad as you imply.

[buu700]

As the saying goes, "If I'd had more time, I would have written a shorter letter". Of course AI can be used to lazily stretch a short prompt into a long output, but I don't see any implication of that in the parent comment.

If someone isn't a good writer, or isn't a native speaker, using AI to compress a poorly written wall of text may well produce a better result while remaining substantially the prompter's own ideas. For those with certain disabilities or conditions, having AI distill a verbal stream of consciousness into a textual output could even be the only practical way for them to "write" at all.

We should all be more understanding, and not assume that only people with certain cognitive and/or physical capabilities can have something valuable to say. If AI can help someone articulate a fresh perspective or disseminate knowledge that would otherwise have been lost and forgotten, I'm all for it.

[Capricorn2481]

> For those with certain disabilities or conditions, having AI distill a verbal stream of consciousness into a textual output could even be the only practical way for them to "write" at all.

These are the exact kinds of cases I think are ok, but let's not pretend even 10% of the AI writing out there fits this category

[tomlue]

This feels like the essential divide to me. I see this often with junior developers.

You can use AI to write a lot of your code, and as a side effect you might start losing your ability to code. You can also use it to learn new languages, concepts, programming patterns, etc and become a much better developer faster than ever before.

Personally, I'm extremely jealous of how easy it is to learn today with LLMs. So much of the effort I spent learning the things could be done much faster now.

If I'm honest, many of those hours reading through textbooks, blog posts, technical papers, iterating a million times on broken code that had trivial errors, were really wasted time, time which if I were starting over I wouldn't need to lose today.

This is pretty far off from the original thread though. I appreciate your less abrasive response.

[timacles]

> If I'm honest, many of those hours reading through textbooks, blog posts, technical papers, iterating a million times on broken code that had trivial errors, were really wasted time, time which if I were starting over I wouldn't need to lose today.

While this seem like it might be the case, those hours you (or we) spent banging our collective heads against the wall were developing skills in determination and mental toughness, while priming your mind for more learning.

Modern research all shows that the difficulty of a task directly correlates to how well you retain information about that task. Spaced repetition learning shows, that we can't just blast our brains with information, and there needs to be

While LLMs do clearly increase our learning velocity (if using it right), there is a hidden cost to removing that friction. The struggle and the challenge of the process built your mind and character in ways that you cant quantify, but after years of maintaining this approach has essentially made you who you are. You have become implicitly OK with grinding out a simple task without a quick solution, the building of that grit is irreplaceable.

I know that the intellectually resilient of society, will still be able to thrive, but I'm scared for everyone else - how will LLMs affect their ability to learn in the long term?

[tomlue]

Totally agree, but also, I still spend tons of time struggling and working on things with LLMs, it is just a different kind of struggle, and I do think I am getting much better at it over time.

> I know that the intellectually resilient of society, will still be able to thrive, but I'm scared for everyone else - how will LLMs affect their ability to learn in the long term?

Strong agree here.

[qnleigh]

> If I'm honest, many of those hours reading through textbooks, blog posts, technical papers, iterating a million times on broken code that had trivial errors, were really wasted time

But this is the learning process! I guess time will tell whether we can really do without it, but to me these long struggles seem essential to building deep understanding.

(Or maybe we will just stop understanding many things deeply...)

[tomlue]

Yeah it can be a risk or a benefit for sure.

I agree that struggle matters. I don’t think deep understanding comes without effort.

My point isn’t that those hours were wasted, it’s that the same learning can often happen with fewer dead ends. LLMs don’t remove iteration, they compress it. You still read, think, debug, and get things wrong, just with faster feedback.

Maybe time will prove otherwise, but in practice I have found they let me learn more, not less, in the same amount of time.