Comment by literalAardvark

It's not as simple as that.

If you're building a home lab, you might just give up because you are tired of searching for Cisco router syntax.

LLM can be the little bit of lube you need to understand things at a higher level, because the tedious things are not as bad as they used to be.

You then end up actually getting a few things in your lab to work correctly, get a confidence boost, and follow up with some searches about how routing actually works and why the syntax is the way it is.

I think that's very simplistic (I also think learning is generally mediated by failure not effort. Effort is just the path through the repeated failure).

If I do a project with an LLM, I want to understand exactly how and why it did something that I didn't know how to do. So I ask it. And it's generally very forthcoming.

Generally I don't have "project = simple|hard" as a thing in my life, I generally know a whole bunch about something I want to do, and maybe not the college-level education of the nitty-gritty details.

Do you know what a really good way to learn is ? Once the LLM has taught you what LICM is and why you want it in a compiler, ask it to give you a quiz on the topic. This is a surprisingly excellent way to learn things.

"Was it easy? Then you didn't learn"

Do you work in education? Learning does not need to be hard at all, this is just a certain education style.

Learning by playing around with the topic with fun would be another one.

Having emotions while learning is a strong enforcer.

And more concretely, finding out why my linux GPU driver is not working is much more fun now, that I don't have to deal with man pages, can ask any stupid question anytime and get a answer likely to be correct immediately - and not have to dig up old outdated forum posts or ask a question somewhere and wait 2 weeks to get a unhelpful answer.

Apparently using sqlite aint learning.