There is a further point to doing your own hard research, after all: you'll learn the subject in much greater detail than you would if someone just handed you the answer. But this has been known forever. The absolute worst way to learn something is to have someone just hand you the answer.

But we don't have enough time to recreate our software systems from sand and iron ore, so we take shortcuts. We decide to sacrifice in-depth understanding for speed of implementation. We punt on the understanding.

The outstanding question is what happens if we punt too far? And is there such a thing?

I think there is a punt too far, personally. And I try to not offload too much of my critical thinking work onto LLMs. No shine without friction, and all that. Sometimes it pays to spend time with pen and paper making your brain sweat before you give up and let the AI just hand you the answer.