Trying 5N paths is useful and sometimes yields interesting insights I’ll retain, but it’s not the rich, challenging, deeply engaging kind of process I find I need in order to develop useful knowledge and skills.
So yes it’s an accelerant for people who want stuff from me, but that doesn’t map directly to learning and building skills. I think that mismatching is really important.
The part I find weird is all the claims that LLM usage leads to less thinking and exploring and just grabbing the first result. I constantly find myself going off on tangents and pulling on threads when I’m working with these tools. Is it really that different than before when my “peers” weren’t able or willing to be curious about their craft? They didn’t explore other programming languages out of curiosity or for fun? That covers literally 95% of all software developers I’ve worked with in the last 24 years across many domains. To them it’s just a job. Their only goal is to deliver tickets assigned to them and go home. They rarely go out of their way to learn something new unless the company assigns them some mandatory courses. Largely the LLM is capable of producing better and more consistent results than they ever could in the first place.
I don’t know how to cultivate curiosity in the work force. Maybe it’s not possible and you have to filter aggressively at the hiring step. But then your pool of hireable candidates shrinks to a few thousand developers most who are probably not actively looking for work.
The only distinction I wanted to make is that the learning doesn’t come by default. Yet that was largely true when people copied mystery solutions from stack overflow and used black box libraries for 90% of the complex work their programs facilitated.
Perhaps not much has changed but we’re now operating at a much larger scale and the opportunity to not be curious is actually more present than ever.
People who are curious are massively benefited by this tooling, in my opinion. Like you’re saying, if you want to investigate and learn, there has never really been a better time. If you’re sincerely applying yourself and pulling all of those threads, there has never been a better teacher.
I’ve wondered about the matter of finding and cultivating curiosity too. I’ve come to believe most humans, let alone programmers specifically, are not all that curious. A lot of us are path-followers and we’d rather not get into the weeds most of the time. Then some of us see weeds and dive in, even when it’s not pragmatic to do so. I don’t know how much it can be cultivated or even removed from a person who has more than enough.
I've heard LLMs can be helpful in limited targeted ways. But not as some kind of "game changing" accelerant.
The downvotes are just a sign of the times. It's also something to observe and think about..