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Comment by ryandv | Hacker News Reader

Ah yes, but of course Norvig never had access to current generation LLMs, which do let you learn C++ in 24 hours! No need to understand the memory hierarchy, the LLM will produce perfectly performant code right out of the box.

With LLMs you can iterate through a hundred thousand software development lifecycles in a month, vastly increasing your rate of project experience gain.

This article is so obsolete, it's literally from the previous century.

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You don’t learn C++ in 24 hours. An LLM merely allows you to produce code at a higher complexity much sooner. This is a death sentence for a novice’s understanding.

I do believe he is teaching courses about LLMs and associated technolgies. He is the author of two major texts on AI.

Yes, the LLM can produce code at a high rate, but you aren't going to learn at the same rate that it will produce code.

Heh, no wonder you are getting downvoted. Did you actually learn anything this way? This post is about learning and not how fast you can generate code, generating with LLM's is not learning. Then when you have not learnt anything but you generate LLM code that looks great but you cannot debug it because you never learnt programming and have to rely on the LLM, you have problems. Much like the CEO who vibe coded on replit and lost his production DB.

My point is that most of that learning is not necessary! Does a JavaScript bootcamp developer know what the fuck a memory hierarchy is? malloc? No! Do they need to? Also no! This ignorance stops absolutely nobody from identifying as a Senior Staff Architect with 16 weeks of experience, closing Jiras at 10x the velocity as these fools with crippling debt and a computer science degree.

LLMs are tools that can accelerate learning, but they don't replace the deep understanding and pattern recognition that comes from years of solving real problems and making mistakes.

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