That's it? It doesnt feel right. This feels good enough for a casual dinner table conversation and not much more.

having llm audit all my work/code, and generate review pages (as a teacher) of before/after with working examples is incredibly useful. Its something no course can do for me, even a teacher wouldn't have enough patience to go through each one of my mistakes.

having things defined/have correct solution to compare for review is useful, and keeps llm on track. Don't think i would trust llm if it were reviewing it all on its own

I am very interested in figuring out how people use LLMs for learning. I definitely have the knowledge, but it is severely autistic in a way.

OTOH, I am curious if there's a "practical value" to this exercise? If the LLM already contains the information and implementation knowledge to implement the networking stack inside an FPGA by itself, what value do I gain by learning about HDL, TCP, the bespoke Xillinx tooling, reading the documentation, reading papers on the implementation and going through every bit of details and theory. I feel like there's a meta skill that is more worthwhile for "practical value".

I’ve written a skill that I basically feed what I’m looking to do, some ideas I had for accomplishing it and any other details like tech stack, etc.

The skill then riffs with me, judging my ideas and suggesting alternatives. We go back and forth until something useful comes out of it. This process isn’t unlike how I do normal development.

However, once agreed it breaks the work into “steps”. It then creates a tutorial for me, for those steps, explaining each line, why each change happens etc. I can then ask questions, muse about an alternative idea etc. Then I do the steps, and I’ve learned and gotten what I wanted to get done.

This has been how I’ve been learning Godot and making a game for the past month or so. I didn’t go in blind, I started with a course from GDQuest so I could feel confident guiding the tutorials. I will say though, having a tutor to bounce ideas off of has been really useful.

I still try to figure it out myself, consult the docs, discord etc. But if I’m stumped I’ll run my tutor skill and have some fun.

this is pretty cool! it feels very good for getting a brief summary/overview of something and getting a beginner's level grasp.

I've been using them by reading some docs/wiki/tutorial, then when I think I understand something trying to do a rough explanation to the LLM and ask if I'm right. I'm usually making some analogy to something I already understand a little. I'm usually partially right but missing some key bits at the first pass. I go back and forward asking for explanations of various bits or asking for resources around the area I'm not understanding. Often times just discovering the relevant name for the area of study opens lots of doors. I basically use it like I would talk to a knowledgeable and patient teacher.

As for how useful it is to understand thins, I believe it's still useful and hope it will continue to be.

I use it by telling it my background, giving it a rough timeline and asking it to create a learning timeline, save progress along the way, and git push / pull periodically so I can use the same thing on both Linux and Mac. I tell it for each phase in the learning timeline, present me information, then challenge me on it. If it's code, it challenges me with a coding challenge, where I use it in an IDE plugin. If I'm learning something that isn't strictly code, then I ask it to give me info, then challenge me with questions and grill til I get it right. I ask it to save what it think I struggled with, so that later we can drill it again and I can also review it in an .md file.

Does anyone else use Claude like this?

It's sped up my learning by 10x. I struggled with 'just reading a book.' Take kubernetes. I hemmed and hawed and spent years periodically reading some dry book or blog or official doc, falling asleep, and forgetting while I got busy. Now I'm aggressively working with it, almost like I'm addicted to a gamification, of getting through our learning timeline, and I'm excited to move forward as quickly as possible and pass its tests.

It's like a fake teacher, because I can also ask it to drill into a topic or re-explain itself if it made no sense.

The only thing that worries me is, sometimes I'll say something like, "Um, are you sure about that?", and it'll apologize and correct itself. I barely challenged it!

For everyone who thinks you can’t learn with LLMs, Dr. Cat Hicks, psychological scientist and author of the recent book “The Psychology of Software Teams[1],” who worked at Google and founded the Developer Success Lab at Pluralsight, has written two skills called learning-opportunities[2] and learning-goal[3] that use validated learning science to help you learn while using LLMs.

Cat also has an awesome podcast with her wife, Ashley Juavinett, Phd, called Change, Technically.[4]

I encourage everyone to check out her work! She’s dedicated her life to helping software developers get the support they need inside organizations to be seen as humans, not just robots.

1: https://www.drcathicks.com#book 2: https://github.com/DrCatHicks/learning-opportunities 3: https://github.com/DrCatHicks/learning-goal 4: https://www.changetechnically.fyi

The little tool it outputted is nice, but click around the stages and the text is not high quality at all. The snippy titles, abbrievated explanations, I wish a few more iterations and thought was put into the actual main textual content. Especially for 'complex' stuff

My high hopes were quickly dashed at the step that involved turning a complex topic into rollercoaster tycoon.