14 years later, as a software engineer, I still think about that book and the way I can trace back a lot of my initial improvements to its requirement that code got written line-by-line. I still maintain the habit of rote text copying as a way to pick up new tools and commands (i.e. copying documentation examples exactly into my editor), and also when people make an assertion like:
> It's like trying to retype calculus solutions — you don't learn from it.
Maybe not everyone learns that way, but I sure did!
[0] - https://www.amazon.co.uk/iPhone-iPad-Apps-Absolute-Beginners...
I can definitely say it helped me learn a lot more than just blindly copy/pasting everything over.
It seems like an exercise to force you to attend to the details. I had a similar experience with a "certified X programmer" exam my employer bought for me. I wouldn't say passing such an exam makes anyone a good programmer, but it was an unexpectedly valuable experience because it forced me to attend to a broad set of details (instead of getting a spotty command of them, due to path-dependent experience).
Similar thing happens with notes: I rarely reference them but taking them keeps my mind from wandering.
Except that you do. Otherwise you could just sit in school or university and just listen and do nothing, but that way you just learn A LOT less, instead of taking down the lecture/lesson.
Having to spend 95% of the time taking notes of things that could be distributed in a PDF has only ever hindered me academically. It's mechanical and boring, my mind tunes out and I get nothing out of it.
Guess what he would ask about in the exams?
So transcription can definitely be helpful when part of a broader, intentional process, while also being insufficient to do much on its own.
And the next logical question to ask is whether there's a better form of intentional behavior that might be more effective.
The solution in TFA feels like an on-ramp to cargo culting somehow; observing that manual typing and good results often go together, but then thinking that it's the typing that directly causes the good results rather than the thought process that accompanied the typing.
There's a much better article hiding inside the current one that's titled "Prevent cognitive debt by understanding deeply the code that your LLM spits out", but that sounds like hard work and would probably not be very popular. It's much better for audience engagement to provide a simple solution that anyone can do and does not require a lot of deep thought like "manually retype everything the LLM generated", even if it doesn't actually work.
> If you absolutely cannot do it then go home and think but for heavens sakes don't look it up in a book till you give up. Looking it up in a book is giving up. > > Paul Halmos (https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~adutta/blog/quotations-powerful...)
I strongly disagree. I used this strategy for learning how to reverse engineer and hook functions in a game with C++ and learned a ton.
I also used this strategy to learn Imgui and it worked great. Before LLMs I did this when learning from books too.
A lot of calculus is rewriting blocks of solutions and applying them to problems. There is a huge chasm between how calculus and real analysis are taught. By your logic calculus should be of very low value. Yet somehow it opens a lot of doors for people to learn other things based on it.
Trying it first sounds slower, but definitely better for cognitive training :)
Having Codex/Claude write all of it won't really benefit you imho.
Also essays too and other texts non code from llm or books, it helps.
Says who? You're saying this unequivocally like you have research that supports this.
I used to re-write the notes I took for studying and it was like night and day for how well I did on tests. IT also gave me a chance to tighten the information I was receiving. And it's exactly what's happening here.