I know JavaScript on a pretty surface level, but I can use Claude to wire up react and tailwind, and then my experience with all the other programming I’ve done gives me enough intuition to clean it up. That helps me turn rough things into usable tools that can be reused or deployed in small scale.
That’s a productivity increase for sure.
It has not helped me with the problems that I need to spend 2-5 days just thinking about and wrapping my head around solutions to. Even if it does come up with solutions that pass tests, they still need to be scrutinized and rewritten.
But the small tasks it’s good at add up to being worth the price tag for a subscription.
Do you feel that you will become so well-versed in it that you will be able to debug weird edge cases in the future?
Will you be able to reason about performance? Develop deep intuition why pattern X doesn't work for React but pattern Y does. etc?
I personally learned for myself that this learning is not happening. My knowledge of tools that I used LLMs for stayed pretty superficial. I became dependent on the machine.
I think part of the reason people tend to underestimate ancient civilizations is because there is only so much preserved, especially because so much of their culture and knowledge was passed on orally, rather than documented in writings. Even if we come up with more archaeological findings or new technology to analyze it, there’s a limit to how much we can know.
But another culprit in this underestimation is supremacist thinking. For example, there is a tendency to elevate the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) above others. The older cultures and religions are often described with pejoratives like “pagan”. In many countries, the history that is “worth studying” is seen as only starting a couple thousand years ago. Another aspect is racial supremacist thinking - I think this is still vast even though progress has been made on the issue of race. For example, textbooks and classes tend to not spend much time acknowledging the mathematical and scientific discoveries of the ancient world.
I hope it improves but I also think there are serious social/tribal problems today that will prevent people from exploring all this with genuine curiosity.
But there is much to learn from other philosophies. China is the worlds oldest continuous civilization. Surely there were some great thinkers besides Konfuzius. Same with India. I attended last week a lecture about the Upanishads. And so much of the wisdom in there can be mapped, more or less specifically, to wisdom from Western philosophy. There is an interesting field of study emerging: Comparative Philosophy. ith the aim to bring it all together. (See for instance, https://studiegids.universiteitleiden.nl/courses/133662/comp...).