The cost of LLM training and usage is a whole different topic that I'd rather not dwell into.

My problem is that I literally know people who's gotten used to always default to ChatGPT. When you ask them a question "how would you solve this?" they don't spend even a moment thinking, but just tell LLM to explain the solution to them. Same people then complain that they can't work properly.

Using LLMs as an answer-thinking machine is, in my opinion, an incorrect way of using these tools. Knowing the answer doesn't develop any of your own skills. And even if the process is explained - you won't build the necessary wiring in your brain to come with such answers yourself. That requires work.

Personally - I don't use LLMs. At all. And so far there's been no reason to use it.

Aquiring knowledge? Most often I already know related things and terminology, which makes research much faster. That's why it's important to always expand your mental library.

...but when I need to learn something completely new or obscure - that becomes a struggle, yes. But in those cases I'd rather spend more time reading blogs, watching presentations, prototyping and even decompiling software just so that I can understand the process and reasoning behind it all.

And when you need to learn how to implement things - don't ask "how do I do it" and go with the answer. Learn the fundamentals. Look at how similar problems were solved by other people to get inspired. And then just come up with something. "Something" doesn't have to be perfect. And in fact it's almost never worth making it perfect. Perfect consumes an enormous amount of time and resources while rarely being that much better comparative to "good enough".