Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it

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• Cool project! I'll be trying it out. I've been a big fan of throwing whatever sources I have on a new topic i'm trying to get into into a llm "project" and then asking it to teach me, grounded on the actual content to speed things up.

  But at the same time, I'm afraid getting everything laid out for you in exactly the way you want will erode some of the understanding you build by going through a primary source directly and figuring things out the hard way. So this having more focus on actually doing stuff by yourself seems right up my alley (while still tending to the LLM induced intellecutal laziness... ) .

  by schmorptron
• I think this is quite a refreshing idea

  LLM's big point is that it is an excellent learning tool

  Lot of people want to generate stuff from it

  but perhaps overlooked is the knowledge you can gain from it

  it is the best tutor you will ever have!

  btw it sucks that you have to disclose if you are trying to make a buck from a project or not.

  Making money shouldn't be vilified or frowned upon.

  by zuzululu
• This is a very cool idea, feels like a sane way to use LLMs in this crazy time! Could be a very good way to break the ice when starting a new project and everything is friction.
  by tatjam
• I have updated the popular /grill-me skill for this exact purpose! I had a very insightful grilling session yesterday on what exactly happens when you try to load an extremely large dataset in pandas, covering everything down to the last detail !
  by rdksu
• Hey this is neat!

  I was telling my friend the other day. The way you learn programming is by typing code out by hand. And I suggested using LLMs to generate minimal educational examples aligned with his interests and needs.

  I've tried the Zed Shaw method to learning programming (just typing out code examples by hand -- doing "studies", the same way you would with music or art). I tested it on a programming language I had been learning for a while and was struggling with. After just a few hours of typing my fluency had skyrocketed.

  I realized that in several hours of typing I had written more code than in weeks of study. Because when you don't know a language yet, producing code is extremely slow and error prone. But typing out correct code is relatively straightforward.

  So due to changing my approach to "just blindly typing", I got more practice (at least as far as reading and muscle memory goes) in a few hours than the previous few weeks.

  Now of course understanding is important too, but it's a separate dimension, and largely comes after memory and fluency in my experience. (Understanding something theoretically and being able to use it are two very different things!)

  The general principle here is Stephen Krashen's Input Hypothesis of language acquisition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis) which says a baby learns language by just hearing stuff -- just being exposed to inputs -- and that adults can learn the same way too.

  And I heard it on the excellent website (now defunct?) All Japanese All The Time, where the author tested the hypothesis on himself by mostly listening to a lot of Japanese and gained fluency in a year.

  https://web.archive.org/web/20080705194055/http://www.alljap...

  by andai
• I’ve been using this general pattern - a custom cli app for deterministic tasks, skills for the agent harness, run the skills in the agent and it produces artifacts for you by using the cli and its own agentic reasoning - a lot lately for work. Things like “give me an executive brief of the activity in these teams backlogs over the last month” and in 5-10 minutes I have a few page doc I can read that is cited with the tickets it analyzed and I don’t have to go bug people or ask them to do yet another task for me, just make sure your backlog is updated and detailed like normal practice. It’s awesome and really fits a useful spot between pure agent usage (which is hard to get consistent results from on repeat tasks) and not having to build/buy a full blown app for every random thing.
  by dchuk
• I think there's going to be the exact and precise range of people there has always been: some people are curious, and want/need to understand what they're doing, some people are not and just want to do. That want/need is a fundamental personality trait what makes an expert.

  LLM are a dream come true for these curious types. They'll only be accelerated by them. I don't think there's any real "loss" out there, just a bunch of people that don't care boing things easier. Good for them, good for the curious people. Net win.

  by nomel
• A related idea is to have the LLM quiz you, Socratic-style about a topic of interest. It persists in asking questions at deeper levels until you arrive at the answer yourself. This forces you to think hard about a problem, and this effort helps with understanding, learning and retention. Of course I made a Socratic-quiz skill for this, to use with any coding agent or similar:

  https://pchalasani.github.io/claude-code-tools/plugins-detai...

  For example I’ve used this to better understand counter-intuitive things about diabetes/insulin, dopamine and motivation, Claude’s implementations, etc (to combat so-called cognitive debt).

  Strong LLMs are surprisingly good at this type of quizzing, they display a semblance of “theory of mind”.

  by d4rkp4ttern