[leptons]

>The whole point is that it is amateur hour and it's wildly effective as a learning tool.

You sound so proud of your accomplishment, and I question if there's really nothing to be proud of here. I doubt you really learned anything, a machine told you what to do and you did it, like coloring by numbers - it doesn't make you an artist. You won't be able to build upon it, without asking the machine to do more of the thinking for you. And I think that's kind of sad.

>I'm a builder, fixer, tinkerer who happens to make a living writing code

I have to doubt that. If you were all those things, you would have been able to complete that project with very little effort, and without a machine telling you what to do.

[theshrike79]

What would be the appropriate way to learn then?

If a human gave me the same "amateur hour" instructions, would that be bad?

If I follow a "make exercise wheel display RPM" tutorial on a website, will I learn?

If it's in a book (distilled information is bad, right?), will I learn then?

[leptons]

OP was writing how great the LLM is, and that he couldn't do this stuff as easily before LLMs. And that simply isn't true.

Instead of breaking down the task himself into achievable steps, the LLM did that "thinking" for him. This will inevitably lead to atrophy of the brain. If you don't exercise your brain, and let the tin-can tell you what to do, you're going to get pretty dull. It's well known that keeping your brain active, solving problems, will keep your mental abilities strong. Using LLMs is the opposite of that.

[Implicated]

lmao - I'm not at all proud of what you called an accomplishment. I literally said it _is_ amateur hour, it's hacked together, not safe, not stylish, not well engineered. But it does work. And despite your assumption about me learning anything - I had _no idea_ how generators worked. The realization that spinning an electric motor would result in electricity being produced blew my mind and got me asking claude things related to that, then I wanted to interface a wheel against my wheel to spin a stepper motor to get a charge and had the hair brain idea to just make the whole thing the generator instead. None of this was stuff I knew.

Despite this thing I made being rather useless in the grand scheme of things it was _wildly_ illuminating in terms of my understanding of electricity and the various objects around me and how they function. Which has spurred another rabbit hole that is having _real measurable effect_ for a host of feral cats to live a more comfortable life. (Not the wheel generator thing)

> a machine told you what to do and you did it, like coloring by numbers - it doesn't make you an artist.

I never claimed to be an artist ;) And, maybe it's different for you, but someone or something showing me how to do something is quite literally the best way for me to learn. /shrug

> I have to doubt that. If you were all those things, you would have been able to complete that project with very little effort, and without a machine telling you what to do.

I love that for you.