I am not happy about GenAI progress affecting my career though I am excited about its application for personalized learning. How do you use LLMs to learn advanced technical stuff better?
Learn by doing. Even more true nowadays, I think the best way to learn and understand how LLM and advanced topic like agent harness works is by, get your hands dirty and start building one. Trust me, it will pay off, one day.
When putting my perf tests behind a setTimeout I found I could push my WebSocket message send speed from 3,250,000 messages per second to about 3,250,000 messages in about 0.002 seconds. I did not believe the numbers so I asked about this on IRC. People said my perf must be broken and I should use AI to find the error. After a few factual corrections about the code Claude confirmed the numbers as valid.
I love the question. I haven't been too intentional in LLM driven learning but for code I do like to get the LLM to make the code and then I review it closely making sure I understand it. Question it etc.
Socratic method seems like a good idea maybe there are skills out there for it.
I've had a bit of success building little games. Not exactly what you'd consider "advanced technical stuff", but I used AI to help me get better at reading the water for fly fishing.
For more technical stuff, like deep database expertise, I used it probably like you do, just tons of follow-ups, ELI5 commands, etc.
When putting my perf tests behind a setTimeout I found I could push my WebSocket message send speed from 3,250,000 messages per second to about 3,250,000 messages in about 0.002 seconds. I did not believe the numbers so I asked about this on IRC. People said my perf must be broken and I should use AI to find the error. After a few factual corrections about the code Claude confirmed the numbers as valid.
Socratic method seems like a good idea maybe there are skills out there for it.
For more technical stuff, like deep database expertise, I used it probably like you do, just tons of follow-ups, ELI5 commands, etc.