Re:Brain activity much lower when using AI chatbots, MIT bof...
by yencabulator on Saturday June 21, 2025 @05:20PM
(#44340813)
Imagine if kids were not taught 1+1=2, but given calculators and shown how to use one. Could anyone do mental math with that education?
Now apply that to LLM used to writing, research, reading comprehension, summarizing, debating, and so on, in the same school system
That's the point of learning arithmetic first without calculators.
"Vibe coding" is primarily being done by people who already weren't learning to program. If programming was taught as ubiquitously and early as arithmetic, they either wouldn't be vibe coding or they were never going to program in the first place because for whatever reason they were unable or unwilling to develop the skill. So you could see this as a loss of potential, but I suspect it is far more of a democratization of programming.
If we're looking at parallels, we should be looking at WYSIWYG webpage creation tools rather than calculators. Did that destroy knowledge of HTML and CSS?