Optimizing for learning vs results

Yesterday, there was an active discussion on Hacker News that was inspired by a blog post of somebody railing against the woes of large language models being able to allow people to do things without understanding what they're doing. In particular, his gripes were, in the end, around edge cases, at least on the surface. But deep down, psychologically, this discussion happens every time there's a new technology where someone laments that the old technology had nice benefits, the new one doesn't. Or that in order for them to get where they are, they had to go through certain difficult trials that involved pain and suffering, whereas the new ones don't. And yet they can get the same things done. One of the two.

In particular, there's one theme that always comes up, which is that the new technologies allow you to do things without understanding what you're doing. In the short term, this is fantastic. Now you can do things that you didn't know how to do before, and you don't need to pay t…