There are phases in every developer’s growth, where you transition from asking coworkers or classmates, to asking on stack overflow, to reading stack overflow, to reading docs and man pages and mailing lists and source code.
I think like you, I worry that LLMs will handicap this trajectory for people newer in the field, because GPT-4/Sonnet/Whatever are an exceptionally good classmate/coworker. So good that you might try to delay progressing along that trajectory.
But LLMs have all the flaws of a classmate: they aren’t authoritative, their opinions are strongly stated but often based on flimsy assumptions that you aren’t qualified to refute or verify, and so on.
I know intellectually that the kids will be alright, but it’ll be interesting to see how we get there. I suspect that as time goes on people will simply increase their discount rate on LLM responses, like you have, until they get dissatisfied with that value and just decide to get good at reading docs.
I think like you, I worry that LLMs will handicap this trajectory for people newer in the field, because GPT-4/Sonnet/Whatever are an exceptionally good classmate/coworker. So good that you might try to delay progressing along that trajectory.
But LLMs have all the flaws of a classmate: they aren’t authoritative, their opinions are strongly stated but often based on flimsy assumptions that you aren’t qualified to refute or verify, and so on.
I know intellectually that the kids will be alright, but it’ll be interesting to see how we get there. I suspect that as time goes on people will simply increase their discount rate on LLM responses, like you have, until they get dissatisfied with that value and just decide to get good at reading docs.