Are LLMs Really Making Developers Worse at Learning?

It's a widely held idea that learning is linked to memory. Reflecting on the years before LLMs, I have to confess: I didn't really remember a thing.

When I started out as a coder, memory was everything. Memory, repetition, and a rapid feedback cycle. This is how I learnt.
For some time, my stack has been PHP, vanilla JS and AWS, with a particular interest in system operations and security. Whether this is too wide or shallow is debatable, but I clearly remember a tipping point where I could not hold it all in my head anymore. I couldn't tell you what I'd coded yesterday, never mind last week.

What I believe you fell back on at that point, was the foundational principles, applied in whatever syntax happens to be in front of you. And this transformation was great, as I truly started thinking about systems and fitting what I...

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