You Have to Earn Your Calculator

In 6th grade, all we wanted was a calculator. In my German school, you got to use them starting in 7th grade, and we were very jealous of the older kids. Why were we still doing math by hand when next year we’d have a machine for it?

When we complained, my math teacher responded: “Yes, there are calculators. Yes, they will make your lives easier. But you have to earn them first.”

He was right, of course. When you do something by hand, you build intuition that the shortcut can’t give you. The calculator is better at computing than you’ll ever be. But it can’t tell you what to compute, or what the result means. You only develop that judgment by doing the work yourself.

Once we’d earned it, of course we used the calculator. That’s the whole point. It shifts the work away from mechanical computation to the interesting part—what the math actually means.

Now I have LLMs. They’re the most powerful tool I’ve ever had, especially for programming. I use them heavily and I don’t want to go back.

But I still remember my math teacher. When I’ve written this type of code a million times, or it’s boilerplate, or the code is just a means to an end—I let the LLM do it. I’ve already earned that.

When I’m learning something new, or doing research, I write the code myself. Not because I’m old-fashioned. Because when I skip the struggle, I don’t build the intuition. I can’t see the shape of the problem. I don’t know what to try next. I don’t notice the questions and choices that naturally come up while writing the code. The understanding is the work, and there’s no shortcut to it.

The trouble is that we’re all in school again, with an amazingly powerful calculator but without a teacher to hold us accountable. Nobody’s going to make you earn it. That’s on you.