Comment by krackers
3 hours ago
This seems contradictory at first glance, if you didn't actually implement it then how well have you actually understood it? It's known from learning theory that engagement or even self-reported understanding doesn't imply that the student can actually solve problems presented to him.
If someone claims to have "understood [middle school] algebra" but they aren't able to solve equations by themselves, you'd be skeptical. Of course past some point of familiarity it's simply faster to throw things into a CAS, but if you remove the initial manual struggle, then have you wired up your brain for understanding? There was a post on HN a few days back about how familiarity with a tool leads to a sense of "embodied understanding" [1], and I think the initial struggle is an intrinsic part of learning to get to the "unconscious competence' level.
I did implement it though. I wrote the code myself. Claude explained to me how all of those things worked, showed me code and examples to illustrate, walked me through the algorithms step by step. It turned out to not be as insurmountably complex as I thought it was. I'm also manually writing articles about all of those things to crystallize everything I learned.
Claude has been amazing for code review. Having someone to talk to about my own code is world changing for a solo developer like me.
Oh ok that's different! From your comment I assumed that it was Claude Code doing the implementation while you only gave it high level concepts (e.g. "add a generational GC"). But if you use it as a resource to clarify concepts while you write the implementation yourself, then it's no different than having a tutor who helps you understand so you can do the homework yourself.
Given the article, I don't think most people are using LLMs in a "tutor" fashion to learn how to do the homework, they're effectively having their homework done by the tutor.
Yeah. I've also been using it as a manager of sorts. I'm not a very organized person. My mental OS can't schedule things properly and I have trouble starting tasks. Claude's been extremely helpful by giving me structure and direction. Just asking Claude to scour the project's chats and give me a list of steps I can easily and immediately start executing pretty much cured me of my ADHD. I frequently ask Opus to do full codebase reviews just so I can have it do this for me.
I totally made Claude do my own homework on my static site generator project though. It's even added itself as coauthor. Haven't even read the commits yet. It was just ripping out broken code and eliminating dependencies. Nothing that even approaches the complexity of my programming language work.