"Just use ChatGPT."

It's become the de facto answer to almost everything: Writing your emails, developing your code, planning your trip. It's the new "Google it."

The advice isn't wrong, but it's incomplete.

When search engines became widely accessible, the barrier to finding information essentially disappeared. The need to memorise information reduced but we learned to find it fast. That in itself is a wonderful piece of technology.

LLM's are the next rung of the ladder. Access to information is even clearer, and we've gained the ability to really interrogate it. Ask follow-ups, explore domains, challenge assumptions.

The core idea is that these technologies are tools to extend your thinking, not replace it.

Through school I remember the quip that students always echoed:

Why do we have to learn all this maths if calculators can already do it?

I don't think I ever heard a super convincing response to this. Most of time just "You won't always have a calculator with you". Smartphones proved that wrong.

The fundamental point to that question is however that a calculator is useless if you don't know what calculation you need to perform. Sure, your calculator can do differential calculations for you, but you need to know when to do one. The calculator removes the arithmetic but not the thinking.

LLM's occupy that same space. Yes an LLM can often produce an answer, and choose a perfectly reasonable approach, but if you couldn't have recognised that yourself, or spotted when it was confidently wrong (something it's great at), then you have already outsourced the most valuable part.

The better you understand a subject, the more valuable, and frankly fun, LLM's become. They let you spend more time on interesting problems and less on the drudgery.

You should still do the homework. It's where the intuition is built.