This is completely different than my colleague who isn't a software engineer, and now all of the sudden is creating PRs which I need to review and correct.

All of this stuff is remarkably easy to self-verify if you aren't, well, lazy.

Notice you didn't ask the AI to 'just design a stereo pedal for me.' You interrogated it, reasoned about netlists, and forced the concepts into your brain through intense friction. That is pure deep work.

At the end I was curious enough that I desoldered those five caps and realized that they were all 2.2nF except for the last stage which was 1nF.

I brought that news back to the LLM and we realigned our understanding of how the effect was achieved, ultimately coming to realize that our approach would have created notches at different frequencies instead of just shifting the phase by about 900 degrees.

It was an incredible learning experience. I try hard not to personify LLMs but this really did feel like working side by side with a friend on a problem until it was solved.

IRL, I suspect that most people who would be able to tackle that challenge with me lack both the time and patience to actually do it.

How much of what you did have you retained? Could you do all of, some of, a small fraction of, or none of the work again today if you had to?

Let's say that LLMs didn't exist, and I learned these same skills in an oddly specific hands-on workshop, or from an oddly specific textbook, or fuck it, let's say that I hired some greybeard pedal designer to just sit beside me and answer all of my stupid questions without judgement for a few weeks at their hourly rate.

Would you feel compelled to challenge whether I had retained what I learned or inexplicably woke up this morning, tabula rasa, and realized that I'd forgotten everything I spent a week teaching myself? I honestly don't think that you would.

For the record, I could reimplement any part of the circuit on demand if I needed to. I might be tempted to look at my notes for the JFET switching because it was genuinely hard to keep in my head, but that's more of a confidence thing than a "shit, I forgot how op-amps work" thing.

I've since implemented a variation into a matrix mixer concept that I'm working on, when it detects that a TS cable has been inserted into a TRS jack.

Yes, the exact same way I would dubious when someone says they learned much from following a youtube tutorial or participating in a two week workshop or something

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mK60ROb2RKI

It's a 90 minute video that will take you a week to watch if you're doing it properly.

Seriously though... you don't learn from watching a video tutorial (which you can slow down and re-watch as many times as you need) and you apparently don't believe you can learn from an LLM which will patiently answer literally infinite questions, no matter how basic or repetitive... would you mind clarifying how you do learn?

Everyone has different learning styles so I tend to take a different strokes for different folks attitude. For example, I don't absorb highly technical stuff from books and the idea of [paying to be in a] classroom where you're forced to endure 95% what you're not interested in to get the 5% you care about (at the speed of the dumbest student in the room) gives me hives.

Yet, it kind of sounds like you might just be arguing for argument's sake. Also, you can learn A LOT in two weeks if you're motivated.

Practice

> Everyone has different learning styles so I tend to take a different strokes for different folks attitude

Okay but at the end of the day the only way to actually learn (and demonstrate that you've learned anything) is by actually doing it

And I don't really consider "I got the AI to do it" as actually doing it, which is why I'm questioning what you've actually retained.

To be clear if you feel like you've actually learned this stuff then good for you. I'm genuinely happy if that's the outcome you feel you have obtained

I'm just personally very skeptical of anyone learning fuck all from using AI to build stuff because like I said... I learn from practice. Using AI is not practice any more than copying from open source repos is.

And frankly I'm bitter because I absolutely cannot learn fuck all from using AI. It is the sort of shortcut that prevents my brain from committing anything to memory.

This is going to sound like I'm fucking with you, but I'm deadly serious: if someone taught you how to do something and you later learned that that person was actually an LLM masquerading as a human, would you forget what you had learned?

It's actually not impossible that you've hypnotized yourself, or could be experiencing a trauma response.

Here's what I can say from the other side: you can only control what you can control, but you will be surprised to realize that you can control a lot if you put in the hours and just doggedly refuse to let problems stop your progress.

I don't think that the answer is a one-man fight against the zeitgeist, though. I promise you that blaming LLMs will quickly go from reasonable position to crutch to weakness. Like bankruptcy, it tends to happen very slowly and then very quickly.

If you treat good LLMs as a tireless mentor that needs to be reigned in and verified, you too can learn stackable skills quickly.

That's ok. When it happens I will simply go live in a cabin in the woods somewhere, raging against the dying of the light

I'm curious whether the "knowledge" you gained was real or hallucinatory. I've been using LLMs this way myself, but I worry I'm contaminating my memory with false information.

Go ahead and figure out ways to interrogate on your work with technical means, that's a critical part of the process with an LLM or not.

What I'm doing is learning the circuit constructs that I need and then putting them to work in real circuits. There's usually a few breadboard steps in the middle, which you could call reinforcement learning.

To me, the telling thing about your question is the implication that I would spend a week learning how to do something and then not test it out. I know that this reply reads as salty, but I'm really struggling to contain my own "wtf" on this end.

Seriously, people that are so determined to prove that LLMs don't work despite how easy it is to test for yourself and see that they clearly do work are the ones that are hallucinating.

I think that you are confusing passive complacency and conflict avoidance with a default state of how we are as a species and society, so far as such a thing exists.

Honestly, I don't think we'd even be here if people defaulted to lazy. The choice to be lazy is a remarkably recent symptom of the late capitalism era. Nobody could be lazy even 100 years ago. It just wasn't a thing.

Your perspective frustrates me because it implicitly abdicates taking responsibility for making good choices, explaining it away as "everyone does it". That is a mythology that you simply do not have to buy into.