Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my own experience, the only path I truly gain intellectual benefits is the one where I work closely with the LLM, test very narrow hypotheses, and leverage it for learning over producing. Trying 5N paths is useful and sometimes yields interesting insights I’ll retain, but it’s not the rich, challenging, deeply engaging kind of process I find I need in order to develop useful knowledge and skills. So yes it’s an ac…
I don’t see these at odds. Sometimes through working closely with an LLM, N paths emerge. Having it go off and test each with defined metrics to determine which is better is the natural follow up. Even better if you dive into the why it ended up being better which the LLM seems to be able to expose well in a lot of cases. The part I find weird is all the claims that LLM usage leads to less thinking and exploring and…
The only distinction I wanted to make is that the learning doesn’t come by default. Yet that was largely true when people copied mystery solutions from stack overflow and used black box libraries for 90% of the complex work their programs facilitated.
Perhaps not much has changed but we’re now operating at a much larger scale and the opportunity to not be curious is actually more present than ever.
People who are curious are massively benefited by this tooling, in my opinion. Like you’re saying, if you want to investigate and learn, there has never really been a better time. If you’re sincerely applying yourself and pulling all of those threads, there has never been a better teacher.
I’ve wondered about the matter of finding and cultivating curiosity too. I’ve come to believe most humans, let alone programmers specifically, are not all that curious. A lot of us are path-followers and we’d rather not get into the weeds most of the time. Then some of us see weeds and dive in, even when it’s not pragmatic to do so. I don’t know how much it can be cultivated or even removed from a person who has more than enough.