by godelski | 2026-03-07 02:09:30+00:00
> I can get the exact right piece of knowledge I need to advance my understanding on demand

This is where I disagree. It would be different if these LLMs were acting as instructors and pushing you through courses designed for learning things, but this is more akin to looking at the section of a textbook that contains the exact paragraph you need. Or doing the same thing with a manual. I do not think this is the best way to learn and I actually think it is a good way to perpetuate misunderstandings. There are plenty of bad textbooks and docs, I don't want to dismiss that, but that extra information in the chapter, the previous chapters, or leading up to that paragraph are important. They are designed to be learned in order for a reason. Skipping that other information more often harms you than helps you. It gets you done with a task faster, but doesn't make you learn faster. Two different things. For review, that's different though, but the other knowledge is already there.

I think there's this belief that there are shortcuts to learning. That's a big mistake. You can't learn programming by reading, yet so many people try to do something similar with different domains. It is exactly the same thing that leads people to conspiracy theories. They have such "swiss cheese knowledge" that they don't understand how things actually are connected. How people use LLMs is typically to take the direct route to the information they want, which is only logical, but misses all that other important stuff that you wouldn't know is important to understanding those things until you have mastery of that knowledge.

If there was a shortcut, people would be writing manuals and textbooks very differently. We've been doing it for thousands of years and iterating it for just as long. It's converged to the place it has for a reason.

> Most people have profoundly bad ideas

Yes, and why? One of the most common reasons is people are missing the surrounding context. All those little details. It's exactly what I said before about figuring it out as you go. This is part of why the "doing" matters. Why that stuff that doesn't seem important to the novice actually is, and why experts include it in their teachings.

> you can implement and get that feedback ten times faster,

You can, but you can also dig yourself into a 10x deeper hole 10x faster. The LLM doesn't make you an expert. The LLM doesn't make context appear. I'm sorry, but all that nuance doesn't go away. The LLM only makes it less visible as it does some things for you and every time it does something you don't know how to do you're that much deeper into the water. It's okay to be in a little over your head (that's how we learn) but these tools also make it very easy to get into much deeper waters than you can handle. When that happens, you are unable to do anything and are at the mercy of the LLM. So good luck.

> I don't think this is a coherent statement

Because complexity is complex. There are many different types. Sit with the idea longer, I promise it is coherent. But I'm not going to give you a shortcut. Maybe the LLM will, I'm fairly confident it will be able to figure it out.