> And I got to where I am thanks to people like me who wrote down and shared their knowledge openly and freely. I’ve benefited from open source. From books people have published online for free and courses they’ve given away. I’ve learned a great deal from people I chat with online, over forums, and at meetups where people give presentations to share their knowledge and work.
I can relate to that.
However, though I don't need an LLM, I have found them to be extremely useful in learning new stuff. I probably used an LLM to learn a dozen different new things, just today.
I find LLM learning to be mixed. I can ask questions, seek clarification, and that helps me get to a specific answer quickly, or helps me to get past misconceptions quickly. But it seems to fall somewhere in between reading books and watching videos for me -- I still feel like I learn best through books, even if it takes longer. Specifically, it feels like actually being a little bit harder forces me to think deeper and/or retain more.
I do not wish for LLM learning to go away, but nor do I wish for it to replace books. I hope that many people continue to write in traditional formats.
There's a group who's even more eager to do that, one that's been running the largest open source project on the planet from millenia: mathematicians.
What the... Are we already to the point where you have to say this to people?
What is your take on LLMs for programming?
Are we already in this state? That people can't do programming without LLMs?
LLMs are not old at all. It's literally the newest thing, and we already need to convince ourselves that we can live without it?
What LLMs do is collapse the activation energy. They don’t replace the hard work, they make it more likely you’ll start and keep going long enough for the hard work to kick in. The first 20 confusing hours are where most people bounce: you can’t even formulate a useful question for a human, you don’t know the right terms, and you feel dumb. A tool that will patiently respond to "uhh, why is this red squiggly under my thing" at 1am, 200 times in a row, is not a shortcut to mastery, it’s scaffolding to reach the point where genuine learning is even possible.
The "you won’t retain it if an LLM explains it" argument is about how people use the tool, not what the tool is. You also don’t retain it if you copy-paste Stack Overflow, or skim blog posts until something compiles. People have been doing that long before GPT. The deep understanding still comes from struggle, debugging, building mental models. An LLM can either be a summarization crutch or a Socratic tutor that keeps pushing you one step past where you are, depending on how you interact with it.
And "just talk to people" is good advice if you’re already inside the social graph of programmers, speak the language, and aren’t terrified of looking stupid. But the "nothing is sacred, everyone is eager to help" culture is unevenly distributed. For someone in the wrong geography, wrong time zone, wrong background, with no colleagues or meetups, LLMs are often the first non-judgmental contact with the field. Maybe after a few months of that, they’ll finally feel confident enough to show up in a Discord, or ask a maintainer a question.
There’s no royal road, agreed. But historically we’ve underestimated how much of the "road" was actually just gate friction: social anxiety, jargon, bad docs, hostile forums. LLMs don’t magically install kung-fu in your brain, but they do quietly remove a lot of that friction. For some people, that’s the difference between "never starts" and "actually learns the hard way."
But, it feels a bit random, like a mix of feel-good motivational things they want to blurt out, but very short on concrete advice. Not sure it's really useful for anyone.
THAT SAID, a while back I stumbled across some Three.js video tutorials on YouTube by Wael Yasmina [0] that were so informative and crystal clear that it completely changed my opinion about learn-code-through-video. I guess it just depends on the subject matter and presentation. I'm way more open to it now, and find some odd videos on there that cover topics that never seem to come up in blog posts and searches. YMMV
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHIm_RXfYBM (example)
Did you learn 12 new things or did you find out about 12 new things? Or did you use it as a component in the learning process?
Everyone probably has a different interpretation of what it means to learn, or how to go about doing it effectively, but my hot take might be that there's not much learning going on if there's not much understanding going on, and understanding rarely comes quickly or without practice, and by extension, most reading or watching doesn't constitute learning unless it's a multifaceted activity of exploration and practice.
The ability to produce information that adds clarity to subject matter certainly can aid in learning and finding out what to learn or where to look further, but I can't learn guitar by reading about how to play guitar, nor can I learn German by exclusively listening to podcasts, and I think this us true for many things.
That said, I think it requires a lot of self discipline and should be complemented with other methods and sources of information to be useful. As a teacher, I really try to prevent my undergraduate students from taking the easy road of using LLMs to solve every easyish problem I give them to *learn*. Sure, they did the homework but most of them did not learn anything while doing it and they finish their first year without having learnt anything actionable regarding computer science (observe that I use a different approach with students from other areas, though I still think it is good to spend a few days without relying on LLMs).
I often use a sport analogy to land my point which works with them, so let me share it here. If you want to learn how to run a marathon and drive 42km every day, then you are certainly (hopefully ?) a better driver but nowhere near to running a marathon (fortunately, no one has yet challenged me with the fact that running a marathon is way less useful to get a job than driving).
(edit: grammar, spelling)
Building stuff for other people forces you to bend the project in ways you might not want to. It forces you to focus on their problems rather than your own. It also forces you to actually deliver. I've got countless projects that went nowhere once I was satisfied I'd learnt the initial, easy, 80% of the area. It's that remaining 20% that makes you an expert, though.
I think about how an LLM could have dramatically shorted that, like it did recently to teach me Bayes' theorem.
It's like asking whether you need a pencil or pen to write. Just do a bit of everything, see what u like and go vertical on the things that stuck with you
That one. I gotta know what I want, and what questions to ask. I’ve been self-directing learning my whole life, and have gotten good at consulting references.
I often know an answer, but maybe not the correct answer, so I simply ask the Delphic Oracle.
I will ask it something like “Here’s how I would do it. Does this look correct? What alternatives are available?”.
I've taken, particularly in people learning programming as a support skill, to teaching them how to verify the solution rather than asking them to deal with hours of frustration while their peers don't bother. A tool is a tool, as sad as it makes me to say looking back on teaching myself how to code 20 years ago.
1. Most of the learning before, especially technical related involved a lot of google searching for the information I needed. LLM here removes a lot of the friction and boring parts of the process.
2. At work I can leverage LLMs for some very mundane tasks, again, mostly related to information gathering. There was a time when I needed days to connect the dots in some very convoluted code written by your average developer. Even more to figure out the purpose of choices and how they connected to the business domain, often in situations where the relevant stakeholders and people with the know-how left the company. This kind of work, made of tons and tons of paper pages with my notes would sincerely exhaust me. And this kind of work has been the bulk of my career because coding was never the hard part. On this LLMs are increasingly better. This leaves me a lot of energy more to actually investigate the overall architectural decisions and technical details both of my projects and their dependencies (which have never been as easy to traverse).
3. Since I am less mentally exhausted (the only way to get mentally exhausted with LLMs is if you're "half vibecoding" so producing tons and tons of code which you are actually thoroughly reviewing) I have way more space to dedicate to learning. I do it both by practicing manual coding stuff for fun or editing the things I don't like in the work codebases I see, or by doing more katas on codewars or leetcode exercises. Also, I end up just in general asking more questions I would've not made just out of sheer curiosity and often learn a lot of things that suddenly "click". Another thing I do is way more spaced repetition exercises on topics I care (such as the many odd things you can learn with a language like C or metaprogramming coolness you encounter in Ruby and similar) on Remnote.
Honestly I don't get how you can learn less by having such a tool that removes so much friction.
But of course, if every AI naysayer conflates every LLM usage with vibecoding and with delegating the thinking and reasoning to LLM messages then sure, they are a disaster used like that. But that's on the user, not the tool.
> argument is about how people use the tool, not what the tool is.
> The deep understanding still comes from struggle, debugging, building mental models. An LLM can either be a summarization crutch or a Socratic tutor that keeps pushing you one step past where you are, depending on how you interact with it.
> But historically we’ve underestimated how much of the "road" was actually just gate friction: social anxiety, jargon, bad docs, hostile forums.
Very well said.
I have also benefited so much from MIT OCW lectures. The quality of their teaching is so high that it showed me that when my children go to college, it will be worth it to send them to a much more expensive elite school.
I don’t think you need LLMs to learn programming.
I recognize that people need different strategies and tools to learn new skills and information. I am responsible for the education of people in my life that have learning disabilities and are neurodivergent. I am not a trained teacher but I have taught numerous people about programming, system design, and so forth. I am well aware that different people learn with different strategies.
You still don’t need LLMs to learn programming.
I have never met a group of people so passionate about sharing what they know with anyone than programmers. This is not an industry that jealously guards its knowledge and keeps secrets. We give away source code, books, blog posts, presentations, video tutorials, etc for free. We get excited about teaching people.
And I got to where I am thanks to people like me who wrote down and shared their knowledge openly and freely. I’ve benefited from open source. From books people have published online for free and courses they’ve given away. I’ve learned a great deal from people I chat with online, over forums, and at meetups where people give presentations to share their knowledge and work.
There is nothing sacred in programming. If you want to learn how operating systems work there are free books, full source code, forums, chat rooms, email lists, meetups, blog posts, video seminars, tutorials and everything you possibly need available to you. Interested in compilers? Databases? Distributed systems? Put your hand up and there will be someone eager to help you and teach you everything they know.
The Linux kernel is millions of lines of C code, how am I supposed to understand that?
You could ask an LLM to summarize it for you. Strike up a conversation. Ask probing questions and dig in. After all, the source code, documentation, and every post on the Linux Kernel Maintainers List, chat transcript and blog post ever written is all in the training set of the LLM.
I’ve never read every single line of source code to the Linux kernel. I doubt anyone has. How did anyone join the project before the existence of LLMs? How did they become contributors?
There is no way to cheat and get to the answer faster than anyone else who had to learn operating systems before LLMs existed. You have to do the work. You have to be curious, do some reading, download the code, form a hypothesis, design an experiment, try it out, learn something, and revisit your hypothesis. Do that enough times and you will build up knowledge faster than you anticipated.
I don’t think that you retain knowledge if you don’t work for it. If you want to learn how to calculate integrals you can read about integrals and work on the exercises yourself until you can encounter a novel integral problem on your own without referencing any source material. But if you ask an LLM to tell you how to calculate integrals you won’t retain that knowledge the next time you encounter an integral problem and it will be unlikely that you can solve novel problems on your own or apply that knowledge to novel problems in new domains.
Reading Crime and Punishment and reading the Cliffs Notes summary of the same novel are not the same thing. When you read the novel you will be experiencing the story and building associations between concepts, memories, and other things happening in your environment, life, etc. When you later recall elements from the story it will be integrated into your experience. Memory is almost like a “re-living,” an embodiment of a past state. The story becomes a part of your lived experience.
There’s no shortcut. You’re not downloading kung-fu into your brain when you’re using an LLM to learn programming. You’re disengaged and passively doom-scrolling content until you get the end result you’re looking for.
You have to do the work.
A desirable feature of LLMs that people using them to learn programming have is that they always have time for your question, you’re not bothering anyone by asking, and you can carry on the conversation at your convenience.
First, talking to people is great. Yes the real-world is messy. People are busy, have emotions, and may not have time for you when you want it. But most programmers are absolutely delighted when someone expresses interest in their area of interest. I know I am.
What if you’re shy about being judged for what you don’t know? An LLM will never judge you! There’s no risk of embarrassment or shame for asking questions to an LLM.
There’s value in sharing knowledge with other people, posing questions to them, and learning to answer questions. We don’t get better at any of these things if we don’t practice. Using LLMs to avoid talking with people and learning from them is depriving you and the people you’re interrogating from developing essential skills and solidifying their understanding.
Because it turns out that you don’t really know something well until you can explain it to someone. And the first time you try to explain something you learned to someone will not be the best way to explain it. You need to try many times. So you actually want people to ask you about it and you want to help people learn so that you can learn as well!
Everything I have learned about programming came from being curious and trying things out.
There is so much out there and everyone is eager to share it.
Want to learn about formalizing programming language semantics using automated theorem proving? Try Programming Language Foundations in Agda.
Want to learn how to design computer chips that can play Tetris? Then develop a compiler for that chip to make other games? Try NAND 2 Tetris.
Want to learn how Postgres works? Download the free source code, figure out how to compile it, find the main entry point and start hacking.
Try refurbishing a Commodore 64 from scratch.
Write a hash table from scratch in C.
Just keep going, keep learning, and share what you learn.
It’s not secret, magic knowledge that is hidden away that only an LLM can unlock for you. It has always been there and you can learn it. You can learn how C is compiled into machine code for different platforms and how that code is executed by an operating system. The tools, the references, the people, the tutorials, everything is open and available to you to start picking it up today.
When you dig down into programming and realize how ABIs are structured, how operating systems were designed and have evolved, how databases work… every thing you learn makes everything else easier to learn. It snowballs over time.
Try not to sell yourself short by trying to take the short cuts. Enjoy the journey. Have fun and meet cool people along the way.