You’re right, they don’t have to be at odds. Before LLMs, there were jobs where I had to power through and make a sort of ‘minimum effort’ approximation without applying much analytical or investigative energy or skill. This isn’t a lot different from churning something out with an LLM. There’s not much to learn, the end product is mediocre, it’s more of a rote path.

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.