This reminds me of the arguments against teaching kids to use calculators in school, at least at the elementary ages. Yes, it's now probably safe to assume they will have one in their pockets their whole lives, but understanding the principles of what's actually happening is still important for the student's personal growth in understanding of the subject.
I know you're on the side of discouraging AI tools (at least that's how I'm interpreting your response), I just want to highlight that I think the calculator argument is different than the AI one.
Yes, they're both new tools here, but the calculator argument didn't have the caveat of sometimes 2+2 won't output 4. LLM tools do have that issue and it's important that junior devs don't overlook this and are able to function on their own.
I think I'm on the side of "use tools to speed up your work, once you actually know how the work ought to be done."
Calculators spit out wrong answers all the time, it's just due to user error, like fat-fingering an operation button or adding a zero somewhere. It's easy to tell when that happens if you understand how it should work, because you're not just using the output blindly.
Same idea with AI tools. It's important that you already know what the output should be, at least well enough to notice when it's wrong. But you probably don't need to type out every line of code and deal with your typos and whatever.
