Are LLMs Really Making Developers Worse at Learning?

0:00This audio is presented by Hacker Noon, where anyone can learn anything about any technology. Are LLMs really making developers worse at learning? By Edward Aslin. It's a widely held idea that learning is linked to memory. Reflecting on the years before LLMs, I have to confess. I didn't really remember a thing. When I started out as a coder, memory was everything. Memory, repetition, and a rapid feedback cycle. This is how I learned. For some time, my stack has been PHP, vanilla JS and AWS, with a particular interest in system operations and security. Whether this is too wide or shallowest debatable, but I clearly remember a tipping point where I could not hold idle in my head anymore. I couldn't tell you what I'd coded yesterday, never mind last week. What I believe you fell back on at that point was the foundational principles, applied and whatever syntax happens to be in front of you. And this transformation was great, as I truly started thinking about systems and fitting what I was doing into the wider picture.

1:00Not just coding to solve whatever problem was under my nose. Greater than so if LLMs are eroding memory, and memory is how we learn. I have to greater than ask, which developers is this change hobbling? As I have this feeling that most people I have worked with stop remembering the specifics a long time ago. I do not think this can be attributed to an as single tool, and I am not convinced that this outsourcing of thinking we worry about started with the birth of Chad GPT in 2022. Stack overflow in Google? Nobody has ever been able to hold all that information in their head. And even before then, people referenced code in books, the horror. Granted, you did have to look a little harder, but I don't think it was ever called a crisis. Unless of course you were that dev that copied and pasted ERM RF asterisk without thinking. What I am less sure of is if what happened to me was compression or decay. It's entirely possible I stopped storing detail because I had folded it all into neat patterns, which I hear is what expertise looks like. It's also plausible that I just got worse at remembering

2:01and good enough at everything else that is stop at mattering. From inside my head, they both present as, I do not recall the specifics, but the work gets done. Greater than claims that LLMs are damaging the next generation imply that you can see the greater than difference between using a tool and depending on it. I can't see that difference in my own memory. But I think I can see it overall in the work. It's the difference between thinking in systems and not between code that lasts and code that doesn't. And this was a problem I had with developers of every seniority long before the proliferation of LLMs. Which is what makes me suspicious about the idea we are going to have real trouble with the next generation of junior developers and their ability to learn. I am not saying there is nothing in the argument. The first stage of learning to code, the repetition, the fast feedback etc. That is real and it is the bit we all benefited from and I can't be sure juniors are getting it. But that's a question about that specific stage, not about memory and learning in general. I don't have an answer on if LLMs will affect our ability

3:02to learn. But I have you a decent reason to think a lot of the people who confidently claim that Theta perhaps are not looking with enough context. Thank you for listening to this Hackernoon story read by artificial intelligence. Visit Hackernoon.com to read, write, learn and publish.