Why exempt people who use English as a second language? Anyone with a level of proficiency sufficient for reading the comments here can manage writing English at a passable level. If that takes effort and requires looking up idioms or words, then good! That is how you learn a language — outsource that and you don't. It won't stick even if you see what is being output.

I don't care if they use an LLM to ask questions about grammar or whatever, as long as they write their own text after figuring out whatever it was they were struggling with.

> Anyone with a level of proficiency sufficient for reading the comments here can manage writing English at a passable level.

I'm an English speaker with some Spanish education and practice. My experience is that reading, writing, listening, and speaking can be quite uneven. Uneven enough to matter.

In the long-run, yes, learning a language is better, assuming your goal is to learn the language. I'm not trying to be snarky: sometimes people simply want to communicate an idea quickly in the short-run and/or don't prioritize deepening a language skill.

I would rephrase the comment above as a question: "Given the set of tools available (in person tutoring, online tutoring, AI-tooling, etc) and what we know about learning from cognitive science, for a given budget and time investment, what combination of techniques work better and worse for deepening various language skills?"