> If I'm honest, many of those hours reading through textbooks, blog posts, technical papers, iterating a million times on broken code that had trivial errors, were really wasted time

But this is the learning process! I guess time will tell whether we can really do without it, but to me these long struggles seem essential to building deep understanding.

(Or maybe we will just stop understanding many things deeply...)

Yeah it can be a risk or a benefit for sure.

I agree that struggle matters. I don’t think deep understanding comes without effort.

My point isn’t that those hours were wasted, it’s that the same learning can often happen with fewer dead ends. LLMs don’t remove iteration, they compress it. You still read, think, debug, and get things wrong, just with faster feedback.

Maybe time will prove otherwise, but in practice I have found they let me learn more, not less, in the same amount of time.