[keeda]

I'm not a researcher in the official sense, my interest is that of a parent whose kids are interested in programming and will be graduating into a world upended by AI, and how I can best prepare them for it. I always look to empirical evidence whenever there is a conflict of opinions, and there certainly are many opinions here!

I initially banned them from using LLMs for homework or coding assignments, because as above, my intuition is that you learn best by doing, and you won't learn anything if LLMs do everything for you.

On the other hand, I personally have learned insane amounts of a new subject matter simply by pair programming and conversing with an LLM. I could not even "cheat" and let the LLM do everything because the problem I tackled is not really addressed anywhere! This forced me to experiment a lot, which helped me learn very quickly.

This led me to wonder what "disciplined" use of LLMs can do for learning... which is how I came across a whole bunch of these studies.

I think your concern is really about disciplined use of LLMs, rather than the overall effect of LLMs on learning. And I would agree: students will just be too tempted to use them to cheat. However, I think those who have the discipline to use them judiciously can supercharge their learning like never before, but only as long they do the hard work of "building the muscles" without AI.