I don't mean to neg anyone, but will someone pick up the fundamentals, if they can keep leaning on a chatbot?

If they want to

Anyone can learn anything if they put their mind to it. Sure. But the question is: does it scale?

School has always been exactly the same way. Students who want to learn will learn. Students who do not will not. ChatGPT changes nothing for the latter, it is a tool for the former.

As a teacher, I have to tell you this is 100% wrong.

Well it’s right, but you can turn a student from one who doesn’t want to learn into one who does.

You can absolutely motivate unwilling or uncooperative students to learn. I have done it many times.

I'm not saying you can't switch between being one of those students, that's a whole other thing.

It's like learning from docs examples (guides), tutorials, stack overflow questions etc. But on steroids. We all have learned this way and still do when we quickly want to grasp the surface level. There's nothing wrong with that.

I've been studying AI by leaning heavily on both YT videos (in particular the Karpathy ones) and chatbots.

It has greatly accelerated the process of building prototypes in multiple languages and building various permutations of solutions.

Doing that has allowed me to study various problems both from the bottom up and the top down. I think that has been useful for understanding concepts.

I could have done the same things without AI, but it would have taken a lot longer.

I agree with this. I was a bit blunt. Each situation is different. Superficial learning might be all you need depending on the circumstances.

I still think it’s better to learn without too much tooling of any kind, but that’s a topic for another day.