I love how well this comment captures the experience of engaging with LLMs as a way to deliberately challenge and expand knowledge.

When I see people worry about LLMs atrophying their mental abilities I assume they haven't thought very hard about ways to lean into using them to expand their mental capabilities.

I have been prototyping some network proxies in a largely "vibe coded" fashion and it has been a mixed experience.

It has definitely accelerated my learning: through the process of writing rigorous plans, I have learned so much about network programming... the intricacies of HTTP2, how to design a fast MITM proxy, performance pitfalls in SSL...

These are things I studiously avoided learning for a decade, now demystified, mostly through Claude patiently rendering many figures and diagrams.

And with Fable, I was able to ship a working Envoy Rust extension in a one-shot.

On the other hand, my grasp on the details is tenuous. Every so often the agent can't progress and I am stuck for ideas, hitting different prompts like they were slot machines. I forget how to solve problems by myself.

I can feel myself becoming supine and dependent on something I know is going to become more expensive, a dependency AI vendors will seek to exploit. It has happened quickly. I do not really consent; it is forced on me by my employer.

I assume that they don’t have time to do that, and are lamenting the fact that exercising those capabilities is no longer on the critical path to getting paid work done.

Yes! The best part is, at any point they are right there to answer any questions, or to challenge or validate and experiment with any ideas! You can go down fairly deep rabbit holes in either case to understand a topic, and -- unlike any other medium other than a live human expert -- you can hone in only on the areas that matter to you most. Or you can just ask it to do something (as long as it's in the digital realm) and see for yourself what happens.

I always say that since one of the best ways of learning is by doing and given that with LLMs we can do so much so quickly, we are in a golden age of learning for those who really want to learn.

I'm guessing you've written a well-thought-out, clearly expressed blog post about this that I would absolutely love to read, if only I knew where it was.