@david_chisnall I learned so much from people I have never met in person early on (e.g. while involved in dslinux.org). Eventually I met some people in person (Subversion and OpenBSD) at which point my rate of learning climbed up immensely.

Granted, once I met people in person I was (unknowingly) well on the way to get paid for some of the work I was doing creating freely redistributable code. But even when I started out at university and barely knew anything there were 12 year olds trying out dslinux who were younger and mindblown learning they could use their DS as a small Linux computer (before smartphones were everywhere) who would learn some things from me, and who ended up going down similar paths.

The importance of mutual learning never disappeared for me even when it became a paid job. Mutual learning has always been what made FOSS a good deal. Learning how to design things. Learning how to work in a distributed team with mostly intrinsically motivated members with very little top-down direction, if any. Learning useful coding idioms and which idioms to avoid. Learning how these ad-hoc communities can operate well and what can cause them harm. It all becomes meaningless unpaid labour without learning things like this.

I have never asked an LLM for anything in my life, and I feel fine. I am not going to let them change this for me.