Quite right. I'm worried about the impact that LLMs will have on the learning process, especially in programming, but also in writing. Programming and writing are both skills that seem simple, but take an absolutely staggering amount of practice to master.

Think about how much your own writing (and programming, if you were lucky enough to start early) evolved from, say, age 12 (when a lot of smart kids start to tackle 'real' books) to age 18 (when you supposedly have a good enough education for 50% of work in most countries) to age 25.

All of that evolution is a direct result of one thing: practice! But with a magic answer box available in everyone's pocket, it'll take truly Herculean effort from a learner to actually grind through the practice instead of just cheating for an answer. I really worry how much an LLM user will actually comprehend their own code or even prose; if you've scarcely written a line of code, how can you really understand what's going on in a debugger? If you haven't done the legwork of writing essays and constructing coherent arguments and comprehending grammar, how will you ever communicate effectively?

Maybe I'm just a dinosaur and these kids will sail a whole level of abstraction above my own understanding of writing and programming, much like how my own generation preferred Python to C, and how the previous generation evolved from assembly to C/BASIC/etc. But then I come back to those missing fundamentals, that empty mental model. It's not like my English or CS teachers had me grind through essays and implementing linked lists and Djikstra's Algorithm for pure busywork. They did it because practice is the only way to truly immerse a student in a practical subject. Maybe it'll work for programming, as long as LLMs get good enough that you can always ask them to fix low-level errors for you? But it seems unlikely to work in prose. And even those generational programming jumps I mentioned (assembly to C to Python) were lossy; most kids I went to school with would be absolutely useless writing C code, and even as a bit of a dinosaur I'm pretty awful at even debugging assembly.

Like you said: you still need to learn grammar and spelling. And I suspect a whole skill tree of other fundamentals!

The way I think of it has evolved a lot over the last 5 years. At this point I think human brains probably do something analogous to next token prediction when we think. For all the hype, I think LLMs are actually more, not less, intelligent than that average person realizes. I think it’s legit, actual intelligence, not just “artificial” intelligence. That may be a hot take but it’s just my perception.