I’ve found that the surfacing of tools and APIs really can help me dive into learning, but ironically usually by AI finding a tool and then me reading its documentation, as I want to understand if it has the capabilities or flexibility I have in mind. I can leave that to LLMs to tell me, but I find it’s too good an opportunity to build my own internal knowledge base to pass up. It’s the back and forth between having an LLM spit out familiar concepts and give new to me solutions. Overall it helps me get through learning quicker I think, because I can often work off of an example to start.
Exactly — one thing LLMs are great at, is basically acting as a coworker who happens to have a very wide breadth of knowledge (i.e. to know at least a little about a lot) — who you can thus ask to "point you in a direction" any time you're stuck or don't know where to start.