> If you’re a rust dev who wants to learn how Actix works don’t just copy and paste the code, get ChatGPT to give you a tutorial
But if you don't know how Actix works, how can you be sure that the ChatGPT-generated tutorial is going to be particularly good? It might spit out non-idiomatic, unnecessarily arcane, or even flat-out wrong information, asserted confidently, and you may not have any good way of determining that. Wouldn't you be better off "using the docs yourself" in the first place, assuming they have a halfway decent "Getting Started" section?
I know it's easy to draw an analogy between "AI-assisted coding" and autocompleting IDEs, but under the hood they're really not the same thing. Simpler autocompletion systems offer completions based on the text you've already typed in your project and/or a list of keywords for the current language; smarter ones, like LSP-driven ones, perform some level of introspection of the code. Neither of those pretend to be a replacement for understanding "how the system works." Just because my editor is limiting its autocomplete suggestions to things that make sense at a given cursor position doesn't mean I don't have to learn what those methods actually do. An LLM offering to write a function for you based on, say, the function signature and a docstring does let you skip the whole "learn what the methods actually do" part, and certainly lets you skip things like "what's idiomatic and elegant code for this language". And I think that's what the OP is actually getting at here: you can shortcut yourself out of understanding what you're writing far more easily with an LLM than with even the best non-LLM-based IDE.
But if you don't know how Actix works, how can you be sure that the ChatGPT-generated tutorial is going to be particularly good? It might spit out non-idiomatic, unnecessarily arcane, or even flat-out wrong information, asserted confidently, and you may not have any good way of determining that. Wouldn't you be better off "using the docs yourself" in the first place, assuming they have a halfway decent "Getting Started" section?
I know it's easy to draw an analogy between "AI-assisted coding" and autocompleting IDEs, but under the hood they're really not the same thing. Simpler autocompletion systems offer completions based on the text you've already typed in your project and/or a list of keywords for the current language; smarter ones, like LSP-driven ones, perform some level of introspection of the code. Neither of those pretend to be a replacement for understanding "how the system works." Just because my editor is limiting its autocomplete suggestions to things that make sense at a given cursor position doesn't mean I don't have to learn what those methods actually do. An LLM offering to write a function for you based on, say, the function signature and a docstring does let you skip the whole "learn what the methods actually do" part, and certainly lets you skip things like "what's idiomatic and elegant code for this language". And I think that's what the OP is actually getting at here: you can shortcut yourself out of understanding what you're writing far more easily with an LLM than with even the best non-LLM-based IDE.