> And I got to where I am thanks to people like me who wrote down and shared their knowledge openly and freely. I’ve benefited from open source. From books people have published online for free and courses they’ve given away. I’ve learned a great deal from people I chat with online, over forums, and at meetups where people give presentations to share their knowledge and work.

I can relate to that.

However, though I don't need an LLM, I have found them to be extremely useful in learning new stuff. I probably used an LLM to learn a dozen different new things, just today.

There's a group who's even more eager to do that, one that's been running the largest open source project on the planet from millenia: mathematicians.

What is your take on LLMs for programming?

But, it feels a bit random, like a mix of feel-good motivational things they want to blurt out, but very short on concrete advice. Not sure it's really useful for anyone.

Are we already in this state? That people can't do programming without LLMs?

LLMs are not old at all. It's literally the newest thing, and we already need to convince ourselves that we can live without it?

What the... Are we already to the point where you have to say this to people?

What LLMs do is collapse the activation energy. They don’t replace the hard work, they make it more likely you’ll start and keep going long enough for the hard work to kick in. The first 20 confusing hours are where most people bounce: you can’t even formulate a useful question for a human, you don’t know the right terms, and you feel dumb. A tool that will patiently respond to "uhh, why is this red squiggly under my thing" at 1am, 200 times in a row, is not a shortcut to mastery, it’s scaffolding to reach the point where genuine learning is even possible.

The "you won’t retain it if an LLM explains it" argument is about how people use the tool, not what the tool is. You also don’t retain it if you copy-paste Stack Overflow, or skim blog posts until something compiles. People have been doing that long before GPT. The deep understanding still comes from struggle, debugging, building mental models. An LLM can either be a summarization crutch or a Socratic tutor that keeps pushing you one step past where you are, depending on how you interact with it.

And "just talk to people" is good advice if you’re already inside the social graph of programmers, speak the language, and aren’t terrified of looking stupid. But the "nothing is sacred, everyone is eager to help" culture is unevenly distributed. For someone in the wrong geography, wrong time zone, wrong background, with no colleagues or meetups, LLMs are often the first non-judgmental contact with the field. Maybe after a few months of that, they’ll finally feel confident enough to show up in a Discord, or ask a maintainer a question.

There’s no royal road, agreed. But historically we’ve underestimated how much of the "road" was actually just gate friction: social anxiety, jargon, bad docs, hostile forums. LLMs don’t magically install kung-fu in your brain, but they do quietly remove a lot of that friction. For some people, that’s the difference between "never starts" and "actually learns the hard way."