You learn to drive from the back seat

I took this photo on January 11th, 2026. It is of a billboard that I had to read every day on my way home.

So why am I writing about it now, almost a year later? Well, it’s very wrong. I suddenly remembered it today, and so now I’m writing to explain why it’s wrong.

So why is it wrong?

I know this might sound crazy, but you do actually learn how to drive from the back seat.

Maybe an AI analogy might help: do LLMs learn to code during pre-training or post-training? The answer is obviously both, but I guarantee post-training alone will not lead to any significant results. During the massive pre-training phase, the model builds relationships and facts about the world. Then during post-training it learns how to use that built-up knowledge towards a specific task.

Driving is the same way. Most of “learning” how to drive happens in the 15 years you spend in the back seat, just taking in the way cars look and feel, how the rules of the road tend to operate, how your parents move their bodies to operate the various controls, etc. Then you sit in the front seat and just need a little tiny sprinkle of post-training to do it yourself. And it’s actually impressively little. I guarantee if you took a 15-year-old with no driving experience and dropped them in the front seat they could drive and make basic turns while remaining relatively in control with zero additional instruction in less than 5 minutes.

If you took a 15-year-old from a remote island who had never seen a car or road before, do you think they could reach the same level given the same 5 minutes in the front seat? Obviously no. But if you really learned “from the front seat” this wouldn’t be the case.

The language-learning parallels are obvious, with this ad advocating for speaking. This is bad advice. You do not learn language by speaking. You learn languages through input. You might get your input from things people tell you to speak, or the things people tell you when you speak to them, but you do not learn from speaking itself.

An LLM does not write functional, idiomatic code without first seeing countless examples and counterexamples.

You do not learn a language through speaking.¹

And you do actually learn to drive from the back seat.