This originally began as one lengthy post but I’ve broken it into multiple posts that are more digestible. This is part 1.
I feel like a bit of a broken record about this topic at this point.
I started my programming journey as a young kid, doing the LOGO Turtle/Terrapin programming on the Apple LC ][ computers in my elementary school. I didn’t really get into programming in earnest until I was a teen, starting out rather ambitiously with the C and C++ languages. A high school class taught me some fundamentals in Pascal, and I was learning how to do some Bash scripting as well, as a hobbyist linux user. I was a TA for my “Computer Programming & Methods” course in HS my senior year, because I had learned C++ well enough to help teach it.
This isn’t to brag, but just to provide some background illustration.
The point of learning is to learn. Reaching the solution is really only a small part, maybe 20-25%?, of software development. The real skills are in the research, hunting, and experimentation.
I’ve compared this to using Google Translate while you’re trying to learn a new spoken language. Or using a calculator to get the answer to a practice set in a math class.
The process of finding the answer is critical early on. You’re learning how to find answers, getting the correct answer itself is less important.
If you’re using an LLM to tell you how to get to the answer, you’re missing out on the necessary exploration.
Additionally, and this applies to experienced devs as well: if you use an LLM to fast track you to the answer, you’re denying yourself the time you would have spent reading through API documentation, potentially picking up additional details that are unrelated. Anecdotally, I’ve definitely learned about new methods / modalities by spelunking API docs to find an answer.
Every “wrong” answer to your problem is still something new you can learn and may be useful later. The LLM response is going to fast-track you directly to the actual answer.
In the following posts, I am going to reiterate these themes:
- Learning “the hard way” is going to help you learn better
- Use it or lose it: skills can atrophy
- LLMs are imperfect assistants