[Retric]

There’s plenty to learn from using LLM’s including how to interact with an LLM.

However, even outside of using a LLM the temptation is always to keep the blinders on do a deep dive for a very specific bug and repeat as needed. It’s the local minima of effort and very slowly you do improve as those deep dives occasionally come up again, but what keeps it from being a global minimum is these systems aren’t suddenly going away. It’s not a friend’s expresso machine, it’s now sitting in your metaphorical kitchen.

As soon as you’re dealt with say a CSS bug the odds of seeing another in the future are dramatically higher. Thus optimizing for diminishing returns means spending a few hours learning the basics of any system or protocol you encounter is just a useful strategy. If you spend 1% of your time on a strategy that makes you 2% more efficient that’s a net win.

[skydhash]

Sometimes learning means understanding, aka a deep dive on the domain. Only a few domains are worth that. For the others, it's only about placing landmark so you can quickly recognize a problem and find the relevant information before solving it. I believe the best use case of LLMs is when you have recognized the problem and know the general shape of the solution, but have no time to wrangle the specifics of the implementation. So you can provide the context and its constraint in order to guide the LLM's generation, as well as recognize wrong outputs.

But that's not learning or even problem's solving. It's just a time saving trick. And one that's not reliable.

And the fact is that there's a lot of information about pretty much anything. But I see people trying to skip the foundation (not glamorous enough, maybe) and go straight for the complicated stuff. And LLMs are good for providing the illusion that it can be the right workflow.

[Retric]

> Only a few domains are worth that. For the others, it's only about placing landmark so you can quickly recognize a problem and find the relevant information before solving it.

Well said. You can only spend years digging into the intricacies a handful of systems in your lifetime, but there’s still real rewards from a few hours here and there.