Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

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I’ve long believed that the best way to learn anything in tech is to attempt to try to build something with it.

My hunch is that people who use the process you are describing will still get a massive leg-up in learning skills like web development.

Often it isn’t a choice between using AI-assistance to get some working vs spending 20 hours figuring it out from scratch: it’s a choice between getting somewhere with AI or not doing the project at all, because life is full of things to do that are more rewarding than those 20 hours of frustration.

Anecdotally, I’ve heard from a bunch of people who always wanted to learn software development skills but were put off by the steep initial learning curve before you see any concrete progress… and who are now building useful things and getting curious about learning more.

I agree on building to learn, but disagree on the massive leg-up. It's like believing that using a template off GitHub is going to teach you much (outside of specific use cases). This is also why a lot of GitHub issues now submitted by users don't even follow very basic processes you may have outlined on narrowing down problems. Here's this long copied code from terminal, fix it.

What makes the most difference in building to learn is the tiny steps you take to build. Printing hello world for the first time, changing it and seeing something else, using inputs for the first time to print hello, [variable], getting that image to animate across the screen. Each step becoming a great foundation for further curiosity, rather than turning your project into a black box.

In contrast, I've heard from a bunch of people who wanted to learn software development, but now don't see a point since AI can do it. Same with drawing. There's a large growing apathy towards learning skills I've noticed.

This is why most advocates for it don't do it from the perspective of learning. They do it from the perspective of building fast in the hands of those who already grasp the foundations.

> It's like believing that using a template off GitHub is going to teach you much

If you use a template off GitHub, read that template, dig into bits of it you don't understand, make some changes to it and see what happens - then you'll learn plenty.

LLMs are amazing tools for learning if you're willing to put the effort in. If you just use their output without trying to learn anything from it you won't learn much from it at all.

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