When chatgpt churns out boilerplate code and ready snippets for your projects, it’s easy to fall in that trap of “I am building this” or “I am more productive now” but in the greater scheme of things, “ChatGPT knows” is still no different than “Google knows” or “Wikipedia knows” or “Stack Overflow knows”.
At the end of the day, we have just replaced one kind of “reference monster” with another that feels somewhat interactive and intimate, is good at searching and filtering, and gives all information through one interface.
But eventually, you must still learn the technical concepts the hard and old school way. AI is still no substitute for that and it won’t be even if AGI ever arrives.
In some ways, LLM is more deceptive than Google/Wikipedia because it gives you the false sense of feeling that you’ve achieved something or know something when you actually haven’t (in the strict technical sense).
I don’t think it is an unpopular opinion. I know many of us on this board alone has said similar things about AI. Any coder who uses AI already knows that at times it saves time and at other times it turns out AI slop. I was just saying to someone the other day that at times I feel less productive because I know what I am doing and have to fight AI to tell it how to do things right when giving me recommendations. At other times I have to just abandon AI and “do it myself” because I need it done right.
But there is no doubt that AI will get better. It SHOULD given all the money spent on it so far. But for now it is great to learn with and bounce ideas off of, but don’t ever blindly take what it provides as the only way, or correct way, to do things. Always scrutinize what it gives you.
What you have said is actually a quite popular opinion.