> and you'll never be able to escape it.

Slow down, cowboy. Getting a LLM to generate code for you that is immediately useful and doesn't require you to think too hard about it can stunt learning, sure, but even just reading it and slowly getting familiar with how the code works and how it relates to your original task is helpful.

I learned programming by looking at examples of code that did similar things to what I wanted, re-typing it, and modifying it a bit to suit my needs. From that point of view it's not that different.

I've seen a couple of cases first hand of people with no prior experience with programming learn a bit by asking ChatGPT to automate some web scraping tasks or spreadsheet manipulation.

> You + limited knowledge of Python + ChatGPT << someone + good knowledge of Python + ChatGPT.

Substract ChatGPT from both sides and you have a rather obvious statement.

> Respectfully but that's a bit like saying you don't need to learn how to ride a bicycle because you can use a pair of safety wheels.

How did you learn to ride a bicycle?

Respectfully, this is an incredibly weak take.

You are making a lot of assumptions about someone's ability to learn with AND without assistance, while also making rather sci-fi leaps about our brain somehow being able to differentiate between learning that has somehow been tainted by the tendrils of ML overlords.

The models and the user interface around them absolutely will continue to improve far faster than any one person's ability to obtain subject mastery in a field.

Just to clarify, I didn't say anything about the OP's "ability to learn". I know nothing about that and can't tell anything about it from their comment. I also didn't say anything about how our brain works, or about "the tendrils of ML overlords".

If you want to have a debate, I'm all for it, but if you're going to go around imagining things that I may have said in another timeline then I don't see what's the point of that.

Your comment said, in many more words, that to embrace LLMs for learning or knowledge enhancement might pay off in the short term but will leave you stunted and operating in a local maximum of potential and possibility.

You could be right, but I strongly suspect that you are actually wrong.

Nope. I said that refusing to learn something will leave you stunted. I did not say that using an LLM will leave you stunted.

The OP said:

>>> For example my Python knowledge is limited and I don't really use it often, so I don't want to spend time to better learn it.

And I replied:

>> Respectfully but that's a bit like saying you don't need to learn how to ride a bicycle because you can use a pair of safety wheels. It's an excuse to not learn something, to keep yourself less knowledgeable and skillful than you could really be. Why stunt yourself? Knowledge is power.

"It's an excuse to not learn something (...) Why stunt yourself?".

> Respectfully but that's a bit like saying you don't need to learn how to ride a bicycle because you can use a pair of safety wheels.

Do you care how a car engine works to drive a car?

Yes. I generally like to know how stuff works and why.

Do you think rest of the world cares?

These who don’t care need help for every little problem. And possibly get charged a lot more than it actually cost in a car shop for any service. So while one can live without knowing it’s ALWAYS better to know

Sorry, is this going somewhere?

You did not answer the question

I actually disagree with this. One of my few really helpful LLM experiences is working with technologies that I rarely touch. nginx configs are probably a good example, or a library I haven't touched in 5 years.

The AI is pretty good at answering "I know this is possible, remind me what it's called or what the syntax is."

For a lot of these the reason I want to look it up is I don't use it enough to build muscle memory. If I did, I'd already have the muscle memory. And in practice, it's just a faster version of looking for examples on stackoverflow.

I'm long time programmer and I learned quite a lot of languages along the way. 20 years ago I programmed Perl and I spent some time learning its quirks. While some of that knowledge definitely helped me all these years, especially regular expressions, I wouldn't write a single Perl line without Googling today.

So learning syntax nuances of yet another programming language which I'll forget soon is wasted time. There's some "fundamental" knowledge, like understanding what functional value is, but the specific syntax that Python invented for lambda - that's not something valuable when I use Python few times a year.

I agree that learning syntactic nuances is not that useful, but it's something that comes naturally from contact with the language.

Rereading your comment I think I got the wrong impression from it. You said:

>> I don't really use it often, so I don't want to spend time to better learn it

And I focused more on "I don't want to spend time to better learn it" than on "I don't really use it often". I also don't use Python often and I have to look up its syntax, same with e.g. R. I guess in that case it makes sense to not spend too much time learning the ins and outs of a language. On the other hand, Python is a staple, like Java was back in the day, and Perl and so on. It's useful, like speaking English. I don't think I would ever feel comfortable saying "I don't want to learn" it; or anything else.