That is somewhat true, figuring things out on my own makes me really understand something.
But I don't have the time and energy to figure everything out on my own and I stopped learning many things, where some useful hints in time likely would have kept the joy for me to master that topic.
So it is probably about the right balance.
There's definitely a balance. Someone told me years ago that when they'd look for one bug to try and fix it, they'd realize a bunch of other stuff about their code along the way. You learn a lot by struggling with a problem exactly when it feels unproductive. On the other hand, there are cases when maybe it's better to get an answer today than spend a week really learning something. For example if you don't care about how a library itself works, AI helps abstract the details away and maybe there really is no cost to that as long as you can see it works.
That’s the one thing about SO that I always found infuriating. It seems their favorite shade, is inferring that you’re “lazy,” and shaming you for not already having the answer. If anyone has ever looked at my code, “lazy” is probably not a word that springs to mind.
In most cases, I could definitely get the answer, myself, but it would take a while, and getting pointers might save me hours. I just need a hint, so that I can work out an answer.
With SO, I usually just bit my tongue, and accepted the slap, as well as the answer.
An LLM can actually look at a large block of code, and determine some boneheaded typo I made. That’s exactly what it did, yesterday. I just dumped my entire file into it, and said “I am bereft of clue. Do you have any idea why the tab items aren’t enabling properly?”. It then said “Yes, it’s because you didn’t propagate the tag from the wrapper into the custom view, here.” It not only pointed out the source error, but also explained how it resulted in the observed symptoms.
In a few seconds, it not only analyzed, but understood an entire 500-line view controller source file, and saw my mistake, which was just failing to do one extra step in an initializer.
There’s absolutely no way that I could have asked that question on SO. It would have been closed down, immediately. Instead, I had the answer in ten seconds.
I do think that LLMs are likely to “train” us to not “think things through,” but they said the same thing about using calculators. Calculators just freed us up to think about more important stuff. I am not so good at arithmetic, these days, but I no longer need to be. It’s like Machine Code. I learned it, but don’t miss it.
Or maybe not helpful in the long run, I feel like AI is the most magical when used on things that you can completely abstract away and say as long as it works, I don't care what's in it. Especially libraries where you don't want to read their documentation or develop that mental model of what it does. For your own view, idk it's still helpful when AI points out why it's not working, but more of a balance vs working on it yourself to understand it too.