I hated English class in high school and college. Words just don't come easy to me when articulating myself. If Chat GPT and other LLMs would have been around at the time, I would have used them as a crutch to help me get by, instead of actually learning what was being taught to me.
When it comes to coding, its very much the same thing. Will coding assistants hamper students' abilities to learn? I use Github Copilot at work and it very much helps me to be a more efficient programmer but I worry about the next generation of coders. Will they actually have the skills or will they just be dependent on tools?
This question gets asked essentially with every technological innovation (will this innovation in X be used as a crutch and cause people to forget [or never learn] how to do X itself?) and it's an interesting one.
Have calculators hurt people's abilities to do math manually? Has photography hurt people's ability to create in other visual mediums? Have DNA sequencing kits caused people to forget (or never learn) how to sequence DNA manually? Have people become less skillful drivers given the reliance on autonomous and other vehicle tech?
The answer always seems to be "in at least some cases and for some people, certainly." I think the more important question is, "to what extent does it matter?" Most people I know today don't know how to use an abacus or a slide rule, but many can use calculators and computers to "do math" they could never have done without those tools. And while I might think it's bad that someone doesn't know how to, say, sequence DNA or do topological algebra (because I
do think it's worthwhile to understand the underlying theory to have the skills behind the tasks people do), it often doesn't actually matter, from a
practical standpoint. People develop different skills and adapt to tech advances (or not).
