2 LLM traps I have sprung on myself

(DISCLAIMER: I know a lot less than the average tech blogger. I was 1 year into "learning to code" when chatGPT dropped.)

Trap #1: Docs? You mean like from Season 2 of The Wire?

Kids aren't reading anymore and people learning to code with LLMs aren't reading docs. I wish I had built the habit of seeking out Official Documentation sooner. But I think as LLMs take over, docs are maybe ngmi or become an afterthought.

LLMs completely replace Docs (especially for juniors) because...

Unlike docs which assume knowledge you probably don't have, LLMs will hydrate the little details & reach you at your level

Unlike docs which you have to find, an LLM explanation is sometimes just a couple clicks away

Unlike docs which are at best related to what you specifically need, LLMs tailor their output to your specific need!

The virtues of the Docs are subtler. But significant.

But on the flip-side: LLMs could never replace Docs (especially for juniors) because...

there's infinite things I could try to understand but I don't have infinite days on this planet. In the docs, an expert has carefully taken the time to tell me what I should focus on!

Seriously. Let's say I don't totally understand React (I don't understand React). I can pick something about React that confuses me, and ask an LLM for a deep dive. That feels productive. But if my taste is bad I'm not using my time very well.

Static documents let you gauge your own growth over time. I have never actually read You Might Not Need an Effect all the way to the end. But I keep returning to it. It stays the same, my level of engagement with it deepens.

You and I can read the same thing and share an experience. If you use an LLM to learn react and I use an LLM to learn react...hopefully we both know React?

A person wrote the Docs (hopefully). Tech is not that big of a world–that person is probably only 2-3 hops on the social graph away from me. Maybe someday I'll meet them. Reading the docs is a quasi-social act.

Trap #2: Trading 40 for 5 + 5 + 5 ... + 5

You never know in the moment if you have all the context & understanding you need in front of you. Should you stay focused and keep staring at confusing code, or seek out more information? If what you needed all along just more time with the material in front of you, LLMs can be just another way to break focus.

EXAMPLE: tracing thru a full stack app

12-18 months ago using cursor, one new thing it could do was answer questions like "I want make {this-specific-change-in-the-web-app}, show me all the files I'll need to touch".
Very quickly I began to rely on this feature to literally do my job (as a junior dev), tracing from a raw database query thru the backend router to the frontend repository file to the specific feature implementation.
This saved a ton of time and unblocked me in the moment. But it also kept me from really engaging with the pattern itself. And looking back...while it's not a huge deal one way or the other I do think it would have been better to have paid the upfront "frustration cost" of figuring out the pattern myself and then using the LLM.

Even if an LLM gives a perfect explanation, an explanation is not the same as figuring something out myself. It's a silly analogy but I think of asking a three-year-old a question with a five-year-old in the room. The five-year old obviously knows the answer, and may shout it out. But the question wasn't for the five year old.

Practicing self-study in 2026 sometimes means telling the five-year-old (the LLM) to fuck off, so that you (the three-year-old) can puzzle over the puzzle. It'll take you a while. And (frustratingly) when/if you figure it out you still won't be as smart as the five-year-old. But you'll know something you didn't before.