Open answers to a reader's letter. A reader recently wrote me a long letter with lots of questions about learning programming in this age of LLMs. After a bit of back-and-forth, I got permission to quote extensively from the letter in order to attempt some answers in public. None of my answers I consider particularly rigorous; the situation is so uncertain that I can only answer to the best of my abilities, but I don't claim them to hold any kind of immutable truth. "I'm trying to understand how...