[danielvaughn]

I'm also self-taught. I've been doing it since (roughly) 2009, and like many others I started at the highest level of abstraction with front-end web dev. I've worked with some mid-level languages like Objective-C and Java, but like you I've never really dug deeper than that.

I know this is tired and cliche at this point, but literally this week I sat down with ChatGPT and asked it to teach me how to write WAT (web assembly text format) so I could understand how memory is managed at a really low level (but not so low that I risk crashing my computer).

It turned out to be super valuable. This is where AI shines for me - I can ask it any question that pops into my head, and also validate whether what it's telling me is true by running the code and seeing whether it works. It was amazing.

If you're curious, I'm fine sharing a link to the chat:

https://chat.openai.com/share/583bf23b-b43d-4566-956a-e92b6f...

[pcthrowaway]

Very cool! Have you already taken the time to cross-examine the output to ensure it's hallucination-free?

[danielvaughn]

Yeah I was running all the code to validate what it was giving me, but I also try to subtly prompt it to repeat itself so I can see if it’s being consistent.

I’m sure it’s not error-free, but the speed of learning makes up for it IMO. Like I’d been struggling for a while to learn tree-sitter, the documentation is overwhelming. I had a chat with AI and got a working solution for my problem in probably 4-6 hours, and now I can write tree sitter grammars without help. It’s really incredible.