>Then you are asking them to waste time.

Having inexperienced staff gain more knowledge about languages and tooling in the context of the codebases they work in isn't a waste of time.

Sure, for example, I'm not going to explain every function in each library or package that we use, and will point juniors towards the documentation. Equally, I'm not going to say "hey ask ChatGPT instead of just looking at the docs", mainly because ChatGPT's knowledge is out of date and the junior would likely be getting outdated information.

>The first time, I wasted 30 minutes trying to interpret an extremely obscure error message, then asked my colleague, then kicked myself because I had run into the same problem six months ago.

So you weren't learning a new language or codebase, you were working with something you already knew. I don't care if anyone, regardless of seniority, uses GPT or any other LLM or any type of model for that matter to solve problems with. You were able to filter through the incorrect outputs or less than ideal outputs and arrive at the solution that suited the problem best.

How are you supposed to do that when you have no foundation to work with?

I do care about people new to a subject matter using it to learn because of the false positives the likes of ChatGPT can spew out.

Telling a junior to use ChatGPT to learn something new is just lazy mentoring and I'd take that as a red flag for any other senior or lead I found doing that.