this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2026
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Programming
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I personally have spent those 100s (actually more like 1000s) of hours studying Software Engineering, and I was doing my best to give an example of how current AI tools are not a replacement for experience. Neither is having access to a sowing machine or blowtorch and hammer (you still need to know about knots and thread / metallurgy / the endless amount of techniques for using those tools).
Software in particular is an extremely theoretical field, similar to medicine (thus my example with a doctor).
ChatGPT is maybe marginally better than a simple web search when it comes to learning. There is simply no possible way to compress the decade of experience I have into a few hours of using an LLM. The usefulness of AI for me starts and ends at fancy auto-complete, and that literally only slightly speeds up my already fast typing speed. Getting a good result out of AI for coding requires so much prerequisite knowledge to ask the right questions, a complete novice is not even going to know what they should be asking for without going through those same 100s of hours of study.