[CelestialMystic]

> My first response to most problems is to ask an LLM, and this might atrophy my ability to come up with better solutions since my starting point is already in the LLM-solution space.

People were doing this with Stack Overflow / Blogs / Forums. It doesn't matter if you look up pre-existing solutions. It matters whether you understand it properly. If you do that is fine, if you don't then you will produce poor code.

> Before the rise of LLMs, learning was a prerequisite for output. Learning by building projects has always been the best way to improve at coding, but now, you can build things without deeply understanding the implementation.

People completed whole projects all the time before LLMs without deeply understanding the code. I've had to work with large amounts of code where it was clear people never read the docs, never understood the libraries frameworks they were working with. Many people seem to do "Cargo Cult Programming", where they just follow what someone else has done and just adapt enough to solve their problem.

I've seen people take snippets from stack overflow wholesale and just fiddle until it works not really understanding it.

LLMs are just a continuation of this pattern. Many people just want to do their hours and get paid and are not interested and/or capable of actually understanding fully what they are working on.

> GPS. It’s so reliable that I’m fine being unable to navigate. I’ve never gotten in a situation where I wish I had learned to navigate without Google Maps beforehand. But this is also a narrow skill that isn’t foundational to other higher-order ones. Maybe software engineering will be something as obsolete as navigating where you can wholly offload it? However, that seems unlikely given the difference in complexity of the two tasks.

I think the author will learn the hard way. You shouldn't rely on Google Maps. Literally less than 2 weeks ago, Google maps was non-functional (I ran out of data), I ended up using road signs and driving towards town names I recognised to navigate back. Learning basic navigational methods is a good idea.