I'm a hobbyist, what am I missing? LLM gave me a new spark. I never managed to get a SE job so some weekends I tinker around with LLM for small personal projects and it helps me learn more.
I think that’s the difference. Using LLMs to learn how to write interesting code, I hope, would be welcomed. I’m not confident that’s true though, reading some of these comments.
We learn a craft in two ways: by watching other people do something, and by doing it ourselves. I've learnt many crafts in my life, to the extent that I've produced useful or enjoyable output: programming, wood working, gardening, cooking, baking. I read loads of books, but nothing you read in a book makes much sense until you do it yourself. If you read a book on wood but never pick up a saw then you might as well be reading fiction.
Programming has always been a bit more difficult because we can't really watch someone else do it. Sure, you can watch someone use their tools, but programming really happens in the head, and you can't watch that. So you very much have to just do it yourself, and read.
When you use an LLM you're not watching it do anything, except output text at a very high words per minute. And you're certainly not doing it yourself. So how can you be learning? I actually don't think I've learnt a single thing since starting to use LLMs and it seems that way for colleagues too. They're producing code they never could have written before, but they don't understand it. They aren't learning.