Answer to: Does AI help people learn faster, or just help them skip learning?

Having been self-taught in programming and seeing how LLMs behave I will tell you my hands on experience. As a disclaimer, I am sure you already know, but I'll tell you anyway, that LLMs don't know how to read, speak, understand or get nuances (such as irony, sarcasm, under-handed compliments, etc., not can they be creative OOTB); they base all they know on the (possibly coached) learning they had and existing texts that they were trained on. Moving on-topic, let's address the elephant in the room: Many people say AI helps them learn faster by providing instant explanations and examples. This is false. It is just an impression, a way that the person perceived the experience of that conversation. Consider for reference the classic delusional scenario of entitled people that I think all of us have witnessed or experienced at some point and I will use a bit of a niche topic just to emphasize it: some random person with absolutely no experience in a domain will read some information on Wikipedia (not even the full articles, just random paragraphs that they are interested in), let's say Quantum Physics. Then they go to post a rant on an experienced person's Twitter (I refuse to call it "X") feed on how they think the experienced person that does what they do for 40+ years, wrote countless papers, participated in even more countless conferences, wrote books, taught courses etc., should do some random thing or that they might be wrong, all based on a few paragraphs they read and some "opinion", not fact. While extreme, that experience was surely felt by a lot of us when some business person said that "anything is possible in IT, and how hard is it to do X or Y? it should be a couple of lines, right?". This is no different. When you don't know a topic and a LLM summarizes it in a(n approximate) ELI18 you feel like you have a good grasp on the topic, but let's be serious, there are tons of nuances that you can only learn from experience and a lot of digging, rather than just "how do I do X or Y?". OTOH, if you have some experience, a LLM might help you generate proper code but this is entirely dependent on how well you write the prompt (and this is where experience comes in) and its "mood" (because it can be on topic, off-topic, embellish code where it doesn't need to, suggest things that are out-of-scope, etc.). Also note that whatever code it generates is great for a PoC, but it should not be deployed as production code, at least not without review. Depending on the prompt, once the security team runs pentests, you might soon see that all that code generated in seconds needs a serious rewrite that would still take some time (maybe not as long as originally, but still enough). That is of course if it respects your constraints. Others argue that AI makes it easier to skip the learning process and rely on generated answers. This is very dangerous. There are not only times when the code that it generates is not enough to address the problem or the answer might even be wrong, but even if it is correct, by some miracle, relying on some text without understanding it is just plain stupid. TLDR: LLMs are great to give you some starting points on your queries, some references, some information, but you need to research it yourself. Relying on the LLM too much might result in incorrect results or worse. This is not even taking into account the brain rot effect. So use it wisely! "Manual" learning is still the best way, especially since that is what was used to train the LLMs. That alone should tell you everything.