Very grateful to have had good self-learning, education, then mentoring before LLM's existed. And although they are such a boon to productivity I worry what they will do to my ability to think on my own long term.
Like reaching for your phone out of habit the moment you are bored, I don't want to need an LLM any time I am faced with a problem. I want to exercise my own brain. I feel as though my ability to reason without them has already began to degrade, my mind fogs more these days. I try to curb it by having conversations rather than just asking for solutions.
I don't care that the tool isn't going anywhere, but just like relying on calculators won't make you better at arithmetic, I don't think relying on LLM's will make you a better engineer.
I think if you are a self directed learner in general, who is drawn toward learning, it will magnify that tendency and lower the activation energy required to bootstrap new domains of knowledge.
But if you don’t like learning, and only do it because you have to, it will magnify that tendency and provide a way to avoid learning altogether.
We are likely to end up with a large subset of the population basically being meat puppets doing whatever their favorite flavor of LLM tells them to do.
Oh totally agree. These LLMs are like tiktok on my phone in terms of addictiveness.