> I feel that I'm learning faster

Yes, you are feeling that. But is that real? If I take all LLMs from you right now, is your current you still better than your pre-LLM you? When I dream I feel that I can fly and as long as I am dreaming, this feeling is true. But the subject of this feeling never was.

If you use coding agents as a black box, then yes you might learn less. But if you use them to experiment more, your intuition will get more contact with reality, and that will help you learn more.

For example, my brother recently was deciding how to structure some auth code. He told me he used coding agents to just try several ideas and then he could pick a winner and nail down that one. It's hard to think of a better way to learn the consequences of different design decisions.

Another example is that I've been using coding agents to write CUDA experiments to try to find ways to optimise our codegen. I need an understanding of GPU performance to do this well. Coding agents have let me run 5x the number of experiments I would be able to code, run, and analyse on my own. This helps me test my intuition, see where my understanding is wrong, and correct it.

In this whole process I will likely memorise fewer CUDA APIs and commands, that's true. But I'm happy with that tradeoff if it means I can learn more about bank conflicts, tradeoffs between L1 cache hit rates and shared memory, how to effectively use the TMA, warp specialisation, block swizzling to maximise L2 cache hit rates, how to reduce register usage without local spilling, how to profile kernels and read the PTX/SASS code, etc. I've never been able to put so much effort into actually testing things as I am learning them.

I feel like my calculator improves my math solutions. If you take away my calculator, I'll probably be worse at math than I was before. That doesn't mean I'm not better off with my calculator however.