I'm kind of in the same boat.

I've started doing something that I have been meaning to do for years, which is to go through all the seminal papers on concurrency and make a minimal implementation of them. I did Raft recently, then Lamport timestamps, then a lot of the common Mutex algorithms, then Paxos, and now I'm working on Ambient Calculus.

I've attempted this before, but I would always get stuck on some detail that I didn't fully grasp in the paper and would abandon the project. Using ChatGPT, I've been able to unblock myself much easier. I will ask it to clarify stuff in the paper, and sometimes it doesn't even matter if it's "wrong", so much as it's giving me some form of feedback and helps me think of other ideas on how to fix things.

Doing this, I manage to actually finish these projects, and I think I more or less understand them, and I certainly understand them more than I would have had I abandoned them a quarter of the way through like I usually do.