It has been generally agreed for years that different people learn best differently. I have found that I tend to learn very well reading books and taking notes (and, as applicable, doing projects) and not so great watching videos. I'd probably even prefer audio lectures rather than video content, if maximum learning was my goal.

I find LLM learning to be mixed. I can ask questions, seek clarification, and that helps me get to a specific answer quickly, or helps me to get past misconceptions quickly. But it seems to fall somewhere in between reading books and watching videos for me -- I still feel like I learn best through books, even if it takes longer. Specifically, it feels like actually being a little bit harder forces me to think deeper and/or retain more.

I do not wish for LLM learning to go away, but nor do I wish for it to replace books. I hope that many people continue to write in traditional formats.

I agree. We still need people like the author to write things down. But I do think that LLMs will be one of the important methods of consumption for this material. Many/most people will still just directly read what the author writes, but a large percentage of people will get it via an LLM -- and I think that's a good thing.

I've never learned so much and so fast as I do with LLMs.

1. Most of the learning before, especially technical related involved a lot of google searching for the information I needed. LLM here removes a lot of the friction and boring parts of the process.

2. At work I can leverage LLMs for some very mundane tasks, again, mostly related to information gathering. There was a time when I needed days to connect the dots in some very convoluted code written by your average developer. Even more to figure out the purpose of choices and how they connected to the business domain, often in situations where the relevant stakeholders and people with the know-how left the company. This kind of work, made of tons and tons of paper pages with my notes would sincerely exhaust me. And this kind of work has been the bulk of my career because coding was never the hard part. On this LLMs are increasingly better. This leaves me a lot of energy more to actually investigate the overall architectural decisions and technical details both of my projects and their dependencies (which have never been as easy to traverse).

3. Since I am less mentally exhausted (the only way to get mentally exhausted with LLMs is if you're "half vibecoding" so producing tons and tons of code which you are actually thoroughly reviewing) I have way more space to dedicate to learning. I do it both by practicing manual coding stuff for fun or editing the things I don't like in the work codebases I see, or by doing more katas on codewars or leetcode exercises. Also, I end up just in general asking more questions I would've not made just out of sheer curiosity and often learn a lot of things that suddenly "click". Another thing I do is way more spaced repetition exercises on topics I care (such as the many odd things you can learn with a language like C or metaprogramming coolness you encounter in Ruby and similar) on Remnote.

Honestly I don't get how you can learn less by having such a tool that removes so much friction.

But of course, if every AI naysayer conflates every LLM usage with vibecoding and with delegating the thinking and reasoning to LLM messages then sure, they are a disaster used like that. But that's on the user, not the tool.

I agree, though, you can still work toward understanding using an LLM (and take it from a skeptical) by, e.g., using them as challengers to your ideas.

That said, I think it requires a lot of self discipline and should be complemented with other methods and sources of information to be useful. As a teacher, I really try to prevent my undergraduate students from taking the easy road of using LLMs to solve every easyish problem I give them to *learn*. Sure, they did the homework but most of them did not learn anything while doing it and they finish their first year without having learnt anything actionable regarding computer science (observe that I use a different approach with students from other areas, though I still think it is good to spend a few days without relying on LLMs).

I often use a sport analogy to land my point which works with them, so let me share it here. If you want to learn how to run a marathon and drive 42km every day, then you are certainly (hopefully ?) a better driver but nowhere near to running a marathon (fortunately, no one has yet challenged me with the fact that running a marathon is way less useful to get a job than driving).

(edit: grammar, spelling)

Thank you. I was pretty sure nobody read my blog. But I'm glad that you enjoyed it!

Yes.

With how much big tech/big corps in general are shoving AI down everyones throats its not surprising people feel the need to say stuff like this. I do find them helpful for learning, but obviously it s not required.

Yes. I work with teenagers and young adults teaching them how to program, both directly and as a support skill. These are bright young people who can work through problems with enough time—but LLMs allow them through these problems in a minute or two.

I've taken, particularly in people learning programming as a support skill, to teaching them how to verify the solution rather than asking them to deal with hours of frustration while their peers don't bother. A tool is a tool, as sad as it makes me to say looking back on teaching myself how to code 20 years ago.

The title makes more sense when you click on the link and read the actual first word in the title.

"LLM as Socratic tutor" isn't quite right, because the LLM can't be trusted. But I have had great results with "LLM as debating partner". Basically, I try to explain the thing I'm learning and have the LLM critique me. Then I critique the LLM, because it usually says something that doesn't quite make sense (or I ask it cite its source and it recants its statement). A few rounds of this is (I think) really helpful for cementing my understanding.

Nobody needed Google in 1995 because Google didn't exist until 1998.

> The first 20 confusing hours are where most people bounce: you can’t even formulate a useful question for a human, you don’t know the right terms, and you feel dumb.

> argument is about how people use the tool, not what the tool is.

> The deep understanding still comes from struggle, debugging, building mental models. An LLM can either be a summarization crutch or a Socratic tutor that keeps pushing you one step past where you are, depending on how you interact with it.

> But historically we’ve underestimated how much of the "road" was actually just gate friction: social anxiety, jargon, bad docs, hostile forums.

Very well said.