It's not reductionist, it's a fact. If you, instead of learning Python, ask an LLM to code you something in Python, you won't learn a line of Python in the process. Even if you read the produced code from beginning to end. Because (and honestly I'm surprised I have to point out this, here of all places) you learn by writing code, not by reading code.

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rybosome 13 hours ago | parent [-]

I encourage you to try this yourself and see how you feel.

Recently I used an LLM to help me build a small application in Rust, having never used it before (though I had a few years of high performance C++ experience).

The LLM wrote most of the code, but it was no more than ~100 lines at a time, then I’d tweak, insert, commit, plan the next feature. I hand-wrote very little, but I was extremely involved in the design and layout of the app.

Without question, I learned a lot about Rust. I used tokio’s async runtime, their mpsc channels, and streams to make a high performance crawler that worked really well for my use case.

If I needed to write Rust without an LLM now, I believe I could do it - though it would be slower and harder.

There’s definitely a “turn my brain off and LLM for me” way to use these tools, but it is reductive to state that ALL usage of such tools is like this.

	▲	shaky-carrousel 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Of course you have learned a lot about rust. What you haven't learned is to program in rust. Try, a month from now, to write that application in rust from scratch, without any LLM help. If you can, then you truly learned to program in rust. If you don't, then what you learned is just generic trivia about rust.